Interview with Charles Duff | Cities of Friendship & love

INTRODUCTION

Charles B. Duff is the author of The North Atlantic Cities, a book on urban planning and development in cities in the United States, as well as those in Europe. Inspired by his travels in his early 20's, he saw the ways in which cities worldwide had different ways of building homes and communities, and why some felt like home more than others. By incorporating his hometown experience of Baltimore, Maryland he was able to recognize a trend in cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, that have Row Houses, and how they promoted community, healthy wellbeing and overall better quality of life.

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MITCHELL: Charlie, thanks so much for getting on today. I really appreciate it. I loved your book. I thought it was incredibly fascinating and insightful. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey, and how you got to where you are today?

CHARLIE: Sure, but first Mitchell let me thank you. I mean, this is great fun. And it's good to be in touch with people 3,000 miles away, who speak the same language. This is, this is great fun, so, thanks.

I'm a planner and a developer on a nonprofit basis. I work in Baltimore, which is a city that needs planning and development and I've had a lot of fun doing things. I'm from Baltimore, and if you don't know anything about Baltimore, one of the things you should know is that Baltimore has a lot of row houses. I've fixed up about 350 of them, in accordance with the Secretary of the Interior Standards. And stabilized a whole bunch of shaky neighborhoods.

The basic question that I set out to answer when I wrote this whole book was something that hit me when I was 20 years old. When I was 20 years old, I went to Europe on a junior year abroad, went to the UK, spent a year in the UK, and I noticed that all the cities felt like home, except that people drove on the wrong side of the road and, the cities felt like home because they had row houses. That’s what I was used to. I was used to Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston you know, and then London. Edinburgh. Not very different.

But then a couple of my old school friends joined me. We took a boat, and we were in Paris. And it's hard to say anything original about Paris. People have said a lot of stuff about Paris, but I think I'm about to say something that I've never heard anybody say about Paris. Paris does not have row houses. Nice town. But all of those beautiful buildings in Paris are apartment houses, and they're not apartment houses because they were converted from houses. They were built to be apartment houses. And in fact, continental Europe is an entire continent of cities like Paris. So, these are apartment houses. And the people in Paris and cities of continental Europe live in small apartments, and they're dark and cramped, and they make up for it by having brilliant street life. And they're not the least bit sorry about it. So, I thought, well, gee, this is really different.  Two ways to build a city. I bet somebody’s written a book about this; I want to find out why it's the case.

Well, I didn't find a book, but a couple of years later, for the first time, I went to the American Midwest and I'd gone to continental Europe, you might say I went to continental North America. I went to Minneapolis, and Saint Paul with a college friend. And Minneapolis and Saint Paul don't look anything like Paris, but they don't have row houses either. They are cities of suburbs around skyscrapers. And that turns out to be the standard way to build cities in continental North America. So here I was, 22 years old, and I said, well, get this, there are three ways to build a city in what we call the Western world. And they're really different and I wonder why. Somebody must have noticed this before I did. Somebody must have written a book about it. And when I was about 50, I realized that either nobody had noticed, which was hard to believe, or nobody cared, which was unfortunate. And at any rate nobody had written a book about it, and I thought, “Well, what am I going to do in my spare time?” So, I set out to figure out why some cities have row houses and some don't. And it turned out to be a great story. I wanted to see what happened next. There was this family of cities that had row houses and that had adventures, and all kinds of things happened to it and it was great fun to tramp through 2 or 3 or 4,000 miles of streets and other people's cities and talk to millions of people, and I hope to come up with some answers.

MITCHELL: Yeah, I think, realizing that at 20 or around 20 is a very acute observation. It is a really, fascinating thing to think about, that you were observing your environment to that degree when you were 20 years old. I remember when I was 20 years old, and I certainly wouldn't be able to or don't think I had the capacity to make observations like that. So that's really, you know, something insightful. Now, so you started to see these environments. You start to think about this, that led you to begin to prepare kind of this thesis of your book. Can you tell us about what the book ended up being about. And basically, a basic fundamental, “What is a rowhouse for listeners and people who maybe don’t know what a rowhouse is?

CHARLIE: Great idea, great idea. Because there are not a lot of row houses west of the Mississippi, or really West of the Alleghenies. A rowhouse is first and foremost a house. It's not an apartment. It usually has more than one floor, but spoiler alert, it's in a row. That is to say, it's connected to houses on either side of it. And you'd better be able to get a lot of light from front and back, because you're not going to get any from the sides. And the row houses, is the standard way of building city neighborhoods in the UK, the Netherlands and in the old cities on the east coast of the United States.

Apparently, row houses didn't fit into Conestoga wagons. You don't find a lot of them in the Midwest and in the West. Lot of them in San Francisco, a lot of them in Saint Louis and in the Ohio Valley, but that's about it. And then Houston builds new ones all the time. They need more. Does that help?

MITCHELL: Yeah, that definitely helps . It gives, people who, you know, are not maybe architecture nerds, development nerds, city nerds like you and I, an idea or a visual of what a rowhouse is. It's this kind of classic, romanticized version of a, yeah, small house, usually. What do you say? Maybe 25ft in width, three stories in height, set in a row.

CHARLIE: Well, yeah. I mean, if you want to know what a row house looks like, Mr. Google will be glad to show you hundreds of pictures of row houses. But one thing Mitchell, I just got to push back on one thing, not all row houses are small. They come in all shapes and sizes. Well, of all sizes anyway. But, in the North Atlantic cities, the cities where the old neighborhoods have row houses, the poor lived in row houses, the rich lived in row houses, people in the middle lived in row houses. So, they come in all sizes. And, within a ten-minute walk of my house, there are row houses that are 700square feet, and there's one that's 40,000 square feet. So, they're kind of all over the map. Mine is, you know, what's the modern typical American house? About 2,700 square feet. And that's sort of the typical house in the neighborhood where I live. You know, they come in all shapes and sizes. Well, all sizes.

MITCHELL: And so, the thesis of your book more or less, can you give us just a broad stroke overview of what that is. What's the continuity across the Atlantic Ocean that you're, that you're discovering?

CHARLIE: The thesis is that the row house is the expression of a society that is run by people of moderate wealth, by what you might call the middle classes. It's not run by kings and princes. And, you know, so far, no society that I know about has been run by the poor, or else, they wouldn't be poor for long. So, if you looked at the European cities, you went to London and Paris in 1600, you would have found they looked exactly the same. You know, a small number of nobles lived in what were basically castles on compressed lots. They were town palaces, and they had armed guards at the gates. And you drove in on a carriage, and the carriage circled around in a courtyard, and you got off and there were 100 people waiting on each other, and 2 or 3 dozen families lived that way in London and Paris, and everybody else lived in shacks. Rich commoners lived in big shacks, some of them five stories tall. Poor commoners lived in little shacks, but they were poorly built. They fell down. The standard way of fighting fires in a city in 1600 was not to pour water on a burning building, but to take a hook and pull the thing down. They were that flimsy. So, in the cities of northern Europe, the urban shacks were tall and narrow. They were very much the ancestors of rowhouses, but they were shacks. They were poor- the common people got low construction quality, poor building materials, wood and plaster, and no architectural style. The kings and the nobles got all the style.

And then you get all of a sudden about 1600, you get a whole country that is run by middle class people, the Netherlands, it's the first country in history that's run by middle class people. And the middle-class people who run the Netherlands are proud of themselves. But they're not as rich as princes. They can't afford palaces, and they say, “We want to, you know, we're used to living up and down in our vertical houses, but we want durable building materials, and we want architectural style.” And what we call the row house is invented in Amsterdam. And the first two of them are built in 1622. They're made out of brick. They're not, you know, it's a durable building material and they have architectural style.

And if you go to Amsterdam now, which certainly do, you'll find that the old row houses have one, well, an architectural style. Amsterdam is the only city I know where private houses make postcards. You buy postcards of row houses in Amsterdam. I don't think you can buy postcards in private houses in LA or Chicago. I mean the Amsterdam Row Houses have style.

So that's a revolution by the Dutch. And we're lucky the Dutch who invent the row house are in the same generation as the golden age of Dutch art, generally. The row houses invented by people who lived with a new Rembrandt and Vermeer, and the Dutch painters. And they were from 1630 to 1670, had a revolutionary approach to painting. And they were the first painters, who celebrated ordinary middle-class people. You think of Vermeer's painting of The Girl with a Pearl earring. She’s not a Dutchess or a Princess or anything, we have no idea who she was. She's just a girl with a pearl earring and she's a nobody, but boy, by the time Vermeer gets through with her, she's a somebody. And what Rembrandt and Vermeer and Frans Hals do is to show that the world's nobodies are actually somebody if you take them seriously.

And that's what the Dutch architects do to the buildings that house the ordinary people, the world's nobodies. They say, “these nobodies are somebodies, and we're going to make their shacks into some houses. We do them of durable materials and give them style.” And then the British copy them first in London, and London burns down in 1666. And they rebuilt it as brick row houses. And people come from all over England, and they learn how to do it, and then they go all through England and Scotland and Ireland, bringing the London style of architecture. And a lot of them come over here. So, the old cities of English North America get built the way the cities of England are getting built. And if you go to the old neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Boston and then go to the old neighborhoods of Dublin and Edinburgh and London, you'll say, okay, looks like home to me, very different from the Midwest of the United States and even very different from Paris.

MITCHELL: Yeah, it's so definitely Amsterdam. The Netherlands were the nucleus. They were the origin point of this type of housing. And it seems like, and you kind of hit on this, it was almost a philosophy or this mentality, Dutch practicality that was the impetus for creating a house like this. It was just this, you know, pretty straightforward house. It ticked a lot of boxes in practicality. And I love that you brought up the reference to what was happening in the art world, too, because that mentality, I think, parallels what happened in the architectural world. What is this Dutch practicality? Where's the origin point for that practicality? If we can hypothesize.

CHARLIE: Well, I read a lot of histories of countries written by natives of those countries. The Dutch historians are the least introspective of historians. They, you know, the British and French and American historians who are always picking the same little nits. The Dutch, you'll say, “Well, we were sitting here in a bog, and if you look at a bog, you have to avoid flooding. And so, you need to form committees to maintain dikes, so your water stays in the canals. And we got used to working together. And then for some reason around 1600 we got rich. And then for some reason around 1700 we weren't rich anymore. And life goes on.” I mean, really, you know, it's kind of hard to tell, but at any rate, I think there are two things that the Dutch are about.

The first is avoiding flooding, and they avoid flooding by building dikes and dikes have to be maintained. And every Dutch city, every Dutch town, every Dutch village and every Dutch rural area has statutory committees whose job is to maintain the dikes. And this isn't just the dikes along the seafront, the Netherlands is full of rivers because it was a swamp, and they had to drain the swamp, and they drain the swamp into canals. And they have all these dikes that keep from being a swamp again. So, you know, beginning in about 1000 A.D. the Dutch started to dike their swamp and make it into fields, and they develop habits of working together. And there's nothing you know that you need- developers and architects. Please, don't, you know, I'm a developer. You're an architect. Developers and Architects are sometimes high ego people, the people who maintain dikes, you know, the committee work of maintaining a dike is not a high ego activity. That's just maintenance. And it's committee work. And the Dutch got used to that. And then that’s one thing Dutch are about, the other thing they're about is seafaring. And seafaring is another intensely collaborative activity. If you want, you can hop on a horse and ride it from here to whenever you run out of water for the horse. But if you're going out to sea in a sailboat, you need a whole bunch of people, and they need to work together. So, the two things that the Dutch are really big on, are things that require collaborative effort, and they become, I think, the most capable middle class in world history. They're just used to working together.

MITCHELL: Yeah. It seems like they had bigger, almost bigger fish to fry. In a way. They were defending their development or their city off from the intrusion of water. And in that way, they almost had to be practical and just kind of black and white about things.

CHARLIE: Right. They had to be practical, and they had to be hard working. They, you know, they if you were an aristocrat in France or Italy, you prided yourself on not working. No. The Dutch will take you down a peg quick, if you pride yourself on not working. They pride themselves on working.

MITCHELL: It’s funny, I just actually got back from Amsterdam a couple days ago and you know I asked the question to one of the locals I was speaking with, I was fortunate enough to have a good conversation with a few local people there. And I said, you know, “What’s the spirit of this place, what’s kind of the zeitgeist of this place?” And one of the things that one person said was he alluded to this idea of community and people are this hardworking community. And it’s so funny, I just see that vein is still running through the city. And I can’t help but think it had its origins in how they built the canal houses and how they fended off water. It seems like that’s very strong in their culture still today. And I also see that reflected in contemporary housing developments they have. We walked through a few of them there and they were telling me about how they mix income brackets, classes if you want to, into their contemporary developments. So, they’re still keen in this idea about community and people need to intermix and you don't want to be the weakest link in the chain because everybody else is relying on you. So, these themes seem to run very deep in the culture. And maybe when you look at it like that, the row houses and what's happening today in Amsterdam, it all makes perfect sense.

CHARLIE: That's. That's really beautifully said. I mean, the row house is not an apartment building. It's, you know, in an apartment building, you've got a whole bunch of people who are living under the thumb of a landlord.

The row house is about you and your family, but so it's individual like that, but it's also collaborative. It's a row. You and your family are dependent on the family next door. If their house falls down, your house falls down. If their house catches fire, your house catches fire -until the 19th century with good building codes. But it really is an artistic representation of exactly what you were describing. People who have a strong sense of themselves as individuals, but also a strong sense of themselves as part of a community.

MITCHELL:  Right. Seems like just a nice balance between those two.

CHARLIE: Yeah, yeah, it's really nice.

MITCHELL: You look at other forms of housing or development like let's say just take the single-family home for example. And that skews more on the side of you know, isolation and more of an independent, attitude, which comes along with a lot of it's, yes, maybe there's a degree of freedom and independence and privacy there, but it comes along with a lot of other, ramifications, like the highway and cars and things like this that, make it very challenging.

But the row house just seems to be this kind of sweet spot. And you and I talked about the idea of a sweet spot, this balance, this harmony and you had mentioned, which I thought was really insightful, it all boils down to this idea of density.

Can you talk about the idea of density and how the row house allows for this sweet spot of density in cities?

CHARLIE: Sure. You know, Paris has 52,000 people per square mile. Most people probably don't think of people per square miles, but I'll help you out. You've probably been to Manhattan Island or at least seen pictures of it. Manhattan Island is not a lot denser than Paris in population. Manhattan has 72,000 people per square mile, and Paris has 52,000 people per square mile.

Manhattan Island has skyscrapers. My wife grew up in a 12-story building, and that was by no means a tall building by New York standards. Paris doesn't have anything that's taller than seven stories high. So, you know, you don't need skyscrapers to have very high densities. And if you walk through the cities of continental Europe, you'll find that they have buoyant street life. And why do they have buoyant street life? They have buoyant street life because people can’t entertain at home. Their apartments are too small and they're dark. So, you know, if you've got really high densities, you are living in a small place, then you'd better have good street life. On the other end, you've got, you know, my favorite city of continental North America is Houston, Texas. Houston doesn't have 52,000 people per square mile. Houston has 3,000 people per square mile. If you think about acres imagine, you've got an acre lot, that works out to be about four and a half people per acre. Which is if you've got an acre lot and you're a husband and wife and three kids, you are denser than the average of Houston, Texas. So, you know, it's a lot like what you're saying. You got a lot of independence that way and Texans, I guess, value their independence, certainly say they do. And I've been to Texas Independence Day parties and they're independent. So, so they’re right. You know, if you have very high density, you get good street life, but you pay the price of having cramped little dark apartments. And if you have big houses with big lots, you pay the price of having to drive everywhere because there just are not enough people within walking distance of every one place.

You know, the folks who run 7-Eleven say that it takes 5,000 households to support a 7-Eleven. So, if you want to have a 7-Eleven without a parking lot, you need to have a city that has 5,000 households within walking distance of that 7-Eleven, and you can't do that with four and a half people per acre.

So, the row house cities, where are they? They are Goldilocks. They're not too hard. They're not too soft. They're not too hot. They're not too cold. The rowhouse cities have a density of 10 to 15,000 people per square mile. That's about 15 to 20 people per acre. And is that enough? Well, enough for what? You know what I think it's enough for is, I think the three things that cities need to do today.

Cities are our best weapon in the fight against climate change and climate instability. Cities, if they're done right, are the best way for people to live good lives with a low carbon footprint. So how do you do that? What’s a city need to be able to do for you? Three things I think:

• One is you need to be able to share heat, maybe even cooling with your neighbors.

• Two is you need to be able to walk to shopping instead of driving, and schools and things like that.

• And three is you need to be able to get around without driving.

This means that you need a good mass transit system. And you should also be able to walk wherever you want. And successful cities have a lot of people riding bikes. It doesn't take just one of them. I know a lot of people- there's a group here called Bike More, and they think that all it takes is bikes, well, they're all 28 years old. I'm 72. I'm not big on this. And I've got friends who are blind and deaf, and they're not big on it either. I have a friend with one leg. He's not real big on biking, so, it takes more than that.

Say, okay, these rowhouse cities, these North Atlantic cities, 10,000 people, 15,000 people per square mile, is that dense enough? And the answer is, yeah. Go to London. London's got, I think, one of the best subway systems in the world. Every place I've ever been in, in London, which is a lot of them, is within walking distance of some commercial street. You've basically got a commercial street every 8 or 10 minutes if you're walking across town. And row houses share warmth like nobody human.

I have a friend who lives in a suburban house that is exactly the same size as mine, about three miles away, and he spends more on heat in a month than I spend on heating, cooling and electricity in a year, and he's not extravagant.

So, some of our cities are really firing on all cylinders. If you want to see a city like this, that's really working well, you can certainly go to the UK, you can certainly go to Amsterdam or the other Dutch cities, but you don't have to. You can go to Boston, you can go to Washington, you can go increasingly, you can go to Philadelphia. Philadelphia has traditionally been something of a poor relation among the North Atlantic cities, no more. And Philadelphia needs a couple of additional transit lines. But, you know, we all need something. And you can go to these places, and you can see it happening every day. People are sharing warmth. They're walking to commercial districts. They're riding on mass transit or they're walking or they're riding on bikes and they're living good lives with a low carbon footprint.

Oh. Silly thing. You know, if you're in Paris, you’ve got a low carbon footprint, but you're living in a tiny space. If you're in Houston, you've got big space, but you're living with a high carbon footprint. You've got a big house on a big lot. Americans like to have big houses on big lots, I wish that would work, but it's not going to work. So, what do you do about it? The rowhouse offers you a big house on a small lot. You can have a big house if you want. You just can't have the big lot and face it, Americans, we don't use those big lots for anything anyway. You ever seen anybody actually do anything in their front yard other than mow it or put ChemLawn on it or something?

So, you know, we can have big houses and the low carbon footprint and the North Atlantic building tradition that starts in Amsterdam and has produced some of the most beautiful cities in the world, is a blueprint for how you do it.

MITCHELL: Yeah. I think that's really, nice. And surmises everything really, really nicely. I think on top of the sustainable benefits. I also see a lot of benefits from a just a pure human perspective, of health. So physical health and mental health, you kind of touched that with the bike having, the proper density to have mixed use, within the same, let's say, acres, so that people can bike and walk to areas that promotes, health.

And I think that solves a big problem that we see today. And we're increasingly, I guess is becoming much more serious, too, for us today is this obesity epidemic that we're, you know, encountering. So, I think it checks the box on physical health. I also think the idea of a balanced density contributes to this idea about mental health and an adequate amount of community, or a dense enough community so that when you're walking through these cities of appropriate density, you are interacting with people on the street.

You're engaging in the city life. You're running into your neighbors having conversations. I think a big issue with the single-family home is that you're in isolation, not only in the house, but then when you get in your car, you're isolated. When you drive to work, you're isolated. You go in your cubicle, you're isolated. So, there's also this idea of mental and physical health that I think the Row House really helps and I think is, in my mind, at the forefront of something that we should be really talking about and thinking about today.

CHARLIE: Come on over. Yeah, I, I think you've got it. And, you know, I have now lived in row houses for half a century. I didn't grow up in one. And I've seen both sides of the coin. And I think you're right. Nothing against where I grew up, there was a lot of community there. It was a turn of the century, you know, streetcar suburb. And there was a lot of community there, mainly through kids or through everybody appeared to have gone to the same two high schools, it was quite amazing. So you know, but, you know, around here, it's a nice balance. What I, what I find is you know many of the people you see when you walk down the street, but it's no big deal. You don't have to stand there and talk to them all day. You can have your privacy and your community. Jane Jacobs writes beautifully about this, she says we have street friends and, you know, they're different from our close friends. You know, you don't take vacations with them. But all the same, if somebody is hitting you over the head, your street friends will run and defend you.

MITCHELL: Sure. Right. Yeah. I think she tells the story. What was it about the baker? Who was, she saw something happen with a child or something.

CHARLIE: I remember soon after we had moved into this house, and in the middle of the night I heard somebody yell outside and I ran to the window, threw open the window, and so had everybody else on the block and people were running out of their houses. Turned out it was just a drunken college student. But, you know, we thought that somebody was in trouble out there, and everybody woke up and was on it. It was neat.

MITCHELL: That's so funny. One thing that comes to mind is, when you wrote your book, you had said it's kind of this love song for rowhouses. How has your thinking developed since that time? What are some of latest things that you've been thinking about? I know we talked about density, but are there any other things that you're seeing in cities that you feel would positively contribute to sustainability issues, health issues, community issues, any trends that we're seeing develop?

CHARLIE: Cities are in the middle of a big change now, at least cities in the Western world, I'm not confident to talk about Asia and Africa, there are several things driving it. The first is that we are making many fewer labor-intensive things than we used to, that life is less labor intensive generally. And what is shaping our cities now, is sort of two things. One is we are living longer, and the other is we're richer and better educated. So, because we're living longer, the size and composition of our families is changing. If you think about it, in 1900, the average American was statistically dead at the age of 43. That was the life expectancy of Americans in 1900. And what that meant was you were a child for 20 or so years, and then you spent 20 or so years raising children, and then you were statistically dead.

So almost everybody lived in households with children. Either they were children, or they had children. And, you know, we were a nation of households with children. Well, now the average age of an American is 82 or something like that. And we're children for about 20 years, and we raise children for about 20 years, and that leaves 40 years. For 40 years, the average American now is an adult living without children at home.

So, you say, okay, if I'm a child or if I'm an adult raising children, what kind of house do I want? What kind of neighborhood do I want? You got a bunch of parents of children in a room and a focus group, and you put the flip chart up and say, what do you want? And they will pretty well paint a picture of the suburbs. They want good schools. They want safe play space. They want to have some chores so that the family can do things together, stuff like that.

Okay, try the same thing with a bunch of independent adults, people who are living without children. They want something to do in the evening. It can be lonely. They want someplace to go. They want to see people. And there's a great cry going up from one end to this great land of ours to the other, “I don't want to clean gutters on Saturday afternoon.” So, you know, the if you ask childless adults what they want, put it on a flip chart, they will paint you a picture of a good city neighborhood. They'll paint a picture of a good city. They don't want to live in a cramped apartment. They do want to live in a good city. They want to be able to walk to a selection of restaurants and bars and bookstores and whatever they want to do. They want to have some space so that they don't annoy each other. They want to have an office if they could afford it, because we might have another pandemic. And, you know, if you've had kids and they've grown up, they were going to want to come back and you're going to want to be with your grandchildren. You don't want to live in a little Parisian apartment.

So, you know, the North Atlantic tradition of building is for you and really meets your needs. Plus, you don't have to clean gutters on Saturday afternoon.

MITCHELL: So, that is conducive to the work I guess we’re seeing in the development of, and trending in just in our population. I think there’s, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like there’s more and more choosing not to have kids and you’re saying this type of home would fit nicely with their lifestyle?

CHARLIE: Yeah, I think it would. I mean, Yes. You know, it's funny, when I was growing up in a city that had 150,000 rowhouses, nobody liked row houses. The people who lived in row houses were saving their pennies so that they could move to detached houses in the suburbs.

And I have spent most of my life trying to make people like row houses because otherwise the city of Baltimore was just going to dry up and blow away. It was a city of rowhouses, and people didn't like them. Then it was going to be curtains for us. And no society is rich enough to tear down whole cities and rebuild them in some way. So, I started out just wanting to save the city by changing what people wanted in the house, by helping them to realize the rowhouses were beautiful, that you could live good lives in them.

And when I started to write this book, really, I think my highest ambition, was to make people say, “Gee, row houses are cool after all.” And I still hope I can do that because that work still needs to be done. The row house cities, you know, the richest people still don't live in row houses.

MITCHELL: It almost just seems like a marketing thing in a way. Like a PR thing, to get people to, like you said think that or understand may, that a Row House is beautiful and functional for a family. When you were telling me that, I’m thinking, “Are there particular things about the Row House that young families didn’t like that they – like actual specifics that they didn’t like to make them want to move out into the suburban houses or was a lot of it influenced by marketing thing, this is what the cultural trend was, the popular trend.

People wanted the automobile; um I can’t help but think that. And picture a young family just flipping through an old-school magazine, you know the car, the single-family home, all those advertising pieces and thinking that’s what they need, but then really not thinking about the practical benefits or positives about row home. Do you see where I’m getting?   

CHARLIE: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And you're absolutely on to something. When people wanted to get out of row houses, it wasn't just a house they wanted to get out of. It was the overall environment and the overall environment you have to you know, the modern suburbia is born in the 1890s, in the nineteen aughts And you say, okay, why did people want to do suburbia in the 1890s, in the nineteen aughts? And the big reasons are environmental degradation.

Cities in the 1890s, in the nineteen aughts, were horrible environmental messes. For one thing, the streets were full of horse excrement, and the air was like the air in Chinese cities or cities at the turn of the last century all burned coal for everything. And in many of them, you know, Pittsburgh's the extreme case. In Pittsburgh they turned on the streetlights at noon. It was so dark and that air killed people. A quarter of all the people who died in Victorian England died of respiratory diseases from breathing coal air, and American cities were like that.

One other thing, they were deafeningly noisy, you know, we all think that a horse and carriage was a quiet little thing, and the horse clops along, and it's all very sweet. If you've ever heard an authentic 19th century carriage driving over an authentic 19th century street, you will not forget it. 19th century carriages didn't have rubber tires, they had steel wheels, and 19th century streets were not paved in asphalt. They were paved in cobblestones. And the first time I ever heard it; it was in Italy, in Florence and there had been terrorist attacks and all around the cathedrals and the art museums, there were soldiers standing guard with impressive looking machine guns. So, I was walking around in the Cobblestone Square in front of the cathedral in Florence, 20 years old, and suddenly I hear machine gun fire. So, I hit the deck. I just, I just face on the on the cobblestones there. And I look up and everybody’s walking around like, nothing's going on. And thinking “what?”, as I got up, I see coming around the corner a carriage, a tourist carriage. You can rent them in Florence, pulled by one horse, not a big heavy wagon, and it had steel wheels running on a cobblestone street. It sounded like machine gun fire.

MITCHELL: That’s hilarious.

CHARLIE: In my city of Baltimore in 1900, there were 30,000 licensed wagons and carriages in the streets were not paved in asphalt. Cities were deafening.

MITCHELL: They had a bad rap.

CHARLIE: They had a bad rap, they had a real bad rap, and the water was polluted and all kinds of stuff. We’ve fixed all the things that made 19th century cities bad. We have our problems, but we fixed everything. We've got clean air. Cities are quiet. You know, you can say what you want about cars, but at least they don't poop on the street. And, and they don't sound like machine gun fire. Well, I was behind a bus today that sounded kind of like machine gun fire, but otherwise.

MITCHELL: Yeah. So, it seems like kind of just again PR thing, revitalizing the image of the Row House. Like you said, you said it great, making it cool again. But I do sense there is something you know, my generation, younger generations coming up. But I think we're starting to sense that, okay, the single family detached home, the lifestyle with the automobile, all of this. Something doesn't feel right here. And I can say that at least in my little community, I think we’re starting to reevaluate these things and question them and say, “Hey is this really the most optimal, but just most – the best way to live.” And that's what my, my journey is exploring these different cities and seeing these alternative ways to live and, and trying to bring them back and, you know, bring them into my practice and bring them into my community. I'm at a great crossroads, I think, over the past couple, five years or so, let's say, because my business has been historically, and that’s all I’ve ever known is single family homes. I’ve worked on other building types and over the past you know 7 years or so I’ve slowly begun to question these things, is this the right thing to be putting out into the environment. It’s definitely a great internal contradiction within myself.

But trying to explore other ways of living, other housing types to begin to try to offer in my practice so that we can kind of continue this path of, making row houses and different housing typologies cool again. People, they just know this idea of a house and their dream is this American Dream. Single family home, two car garage, and it's more programed to think that way.

CHARLIE: Well, good for you. I mean. Yeah. And I think you're on to something. I mean, America has by far the highest carbon footprint per person in the world. We're driving the climate crisis. And 40% of our emissions come from our buildings and 10% come from our cars. That's half of the total. if we can find a way of dealing with that seriously, without having to change our whole culture.

I mean, if we lived like the French would have to change our whole culture and, I don't think we're going to do that, but I think we can get a large number of people to live on smaller lots, to walk more, to demand a better transit. You don't get good mass transit unless you have a lot of middle-class voters living in urban density.

You say, well, it's a chicken and egg problem. Okay, yeah, it's true. It's a chicken and egg problem. But what I have found in my experience here in Baltimore, Maryland, is that you can make a chicken, and the chicken will then demand an egg. And I think that's how things happen.

MITCHELL: One of the things that we talked about, that you talked about at the end of your book that I thought was really insightful, and helped me  kind of get a lay of the landscape of what I think you’re thinking was and what the history of cities was, and I’ll read it here, this is not verbatim from your book, but this is the general concept. “The history of cities has been about religion and warfare, then industry and commerce.” Now you’re thinking that the future of our cities needs to be based upon these ideas about possibly friendship and love. And that resonated with me, and I wanted to see if you could talk more about that and tell us what a city like that would look like in your vision.

CHARLIE: Yeah. Well, sure. And first of all, you know, I wish you'd been born a beautiful woman. You're the first person who has ever told me I thought that was a good idea. So, thank you.

Cities are a technology for bringing people together face to face. And if you want to know, how should a city be designed? How should it be built? You have to say, okay, why does society need to bring people together face to face? And I think we have lived through two urban eras like that in antiquity, in places like Jerusalem and Rome and Babylon. We wanted to get people together for two reasons worship and warfare. You had temples and you had to have big processions and worship, and then you had to beat your enemies, or at least you thought you did, or you couldn't let them beat you, and you needed to be able to get a whole bunch of people together to tell them what to do. Because you couldn't send them letters, didn't have a loudspeaker system or TV. So, worship and warfare. And if you look at the cities of worship and warfare, you can tell that they're cities of worship and warfare. The classic case is Athens. You look at Athens from a distance and what you see is a giant fortified citadel with a bunch of temples on the top. It is a city that is about worship and warfare. And if you look at medieval cities, you'll see that you've got a castle and a big church or a cathedral next to it. Medieval cities are about worship and warfare. Things haven't changed very much.

But then in about a thousand A.D., you start getting cities of commerce and industry, and you get them first in Italy and in the Low Countries, cities like Florence and Venice and Milan. These are not cities of worship and warfare. They have cathedrals and they have fortresses. But that's not what they're about. They're about making things and selling things or really historically, in a different order. First, they sell things and then they make them. They replace their imports.

And so, you get a new kind of a city, and it takes a long time for people to figure out how you can express a city of commerce and industry. These are cities of commerce and industry. But if you look at old pictures of Florence and the Renaissance, what you see is churches and, you know, walls, you don't realize that the city type has changed even though it has. And the people who figure out how to turn commerce and industry into visible art into a visible skyline are the architects of Chicago and New York who invent the skyscraper and the skyscraper skyline. When you look at an American city today, or increasingly, a city anywhere in the world, you will say, this was a city of commerce and industry. What do these people need to bring people together for? Commerce and industry. Making things, selling things, accounting for things.

Importantly, if you look at Washington DC, Washington DC does not have skyscrapers. There's a height limit on buildings of 110ft. Washington does not want to look like a city of commerce and industry. Washington wants to look like the capital of a republic, and it will not let commerce and industry hog the skyline. So, so that's you know, I think that's pretty important. And so where are we now? I mean, I think we all think that we're living in cities of commerce and industry. But we're not. We might again if America reindustrializes. But I don't think so because modern manufacturing and modern warehousing and modern shipping, they’re very capital intensive. They don't require big labor forces. My Baltimore here is a port city. We're moving twice as much tonnage as we were moving when I was a kid. When I was a kid, we had 16,000 longshoremen loading ships and unloading ships. We're moving twice as much tonnage now with 700 longshoremen. So, you can do commerce and industry, but you don't need a lot of people for that. You don't really need a city for that.

So, what do we need cities for? I think we need cities for the private lives of mainly childless adults. Nobody used to care about childless adults because there were very many of them. Now, the majority of adults in the United States are childless. On any given day, whether they're younger or older, they want to be connected to other people in formal ways and in informal ways.

They want to do things with other people; they want to find mates or find other mates. And so, I'm grateful to you for liking the phrase that I came up with for a city of those kind, I call them cities of friendship and love. And that makes it sound maybe a little bit unimportant. It is not unimportant.

This is what people are coming together for today. And those of you in the audience, if you have a better name for a city of this kind, because Mitchell and I seem to be the only people on earth who like the name I came up with, please submit it to, you know, to either ROST Architecture or Charlie Duff.

MITCHELL: Yeah, I think one could look at that and say, oh, you know, how cliche is that or whatever it is. But I do think we need to take that seriously and say a city like that displays a more, I'm going back to this idea of practicality, like a more practical, stripped down, realistic view of humanity. What do we want? Fundamentally, as humans, we want connection. We want to feel like we're part of a group. We want to feel loved.

Those are fundamental things ingrained in our biology. And they're not stories. We are being told from marketing or whatever, they're not, you know, they're not stories we're layering on. They're very fundamental. So, in some way that that when you said that and I read that in your book, it did make me feel like, wow, you hit a sweet spot there, acknowledging the baseline needs of humans. Yeah. And so, it really resonated with me, but I keep thinking, okay, what does that look like? I'm an architect, and like, okay, how does that what does that look like? How do we do that? Do you have any thoughts on that?

CHARLIE: Well, yeah. I mean, I think the two keys to it are, rowhouses and good apartment buildings, and sometimes a rowhouse with a rental unit in it, you know an accessory dwelling unit. So, if you can figure out ways of designing- Americans can do apartments. I'm not worried about that. Apartments are good things. They have their place. What we haven't figured out how to do is larger houses that ordinary Americans actually want to live in. And the rowhouse is a good one, I think, the best that's out there.

But so, if you're in, you know, Boston, you've got traditional row houses to model yourself on. You know, I've been talking to people in Oklahoma City. They don't have traditional row houses to model themselves on. They have to invent it, and, wherever you may be, you may well have to invent it too. Look at your local building culture. Ask yourself, what are people already like? What do they like on the outside of the house? What do they like on the inside of the house? ROST Architecture and Interiors, you know what do they like on the inside, on the outside then say, okay, how do we give them what they already like in a somewhat different package? And there are, there's a fair amount of thinking going on about this, the Council [Congress] for the New Urbanism thinks a fair amount about this stuff.

There's a group I do things within London called Create Streets, they're a little more focused on. They think it should be traditional British architecture. I think it should be whatever architecture people like. and if you're in a place where traditional architecture will get people to buy row houses, knock yourself out. So, but try to figure out how to give people what they want, in a different package. But you can do it.

MITCHELL: Yeah. I think that one of the potential challenges in my mind is also dealing with the zoning requirements and how land is divided up in certain communities. I think to someway, there's a very prescriptive formula that that zoning departments require you to build within, and that would not allow for that. Some types of density. So, I think it's even working with the different municipalities and agencies to talk to them about, reassessing these things and saying, hey, can we look at that? But that's a much deeper discussion and that's a heavy lift.

CHARLIE: And people are working on that. There is this thing called, you know, the Council [Congress] for New Urbanism, which isn't as new as it was 40 years ago, they began by saying, how do we rewrite zoning ordinances so that you can actually build, things that many people want?

And, you know, they built seaside resort in Florida. And Kentlands, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Washington, DC. And, you know, what you get in these places is, you know, a row of houses and then a couple of freestanding houses. You get back alleys so that people don't have to park on the street. You got accessory dwelling units, sometimes accessible from the back alley. There are a lot of tricks, but you're right. I mean, you know, I started my career working for a county Department of Planning and Zoning, and I took a vacation to Nantucket Island and fell in love with Nantucket town, which is, I think that, finest piece of township that Americans have ever made. And I wrote a zoning ordinance to build Nantucket town.

And my bosses just laughed me out onto the sidewalk, they thought that was the dumbest thing they'd ever heard of in all their born days, and I responded to that by looking for work and finding it.

MITCHELL: I sometimes I feel like that's when, you know, you're almost on to something, though, when you get scrutinized like that. And you’re kind of pushing against the grain, that’s when you know you’re onto something I think. 

CHARLIE: Yeah, I mean either that of that or you're on to nothing. I mean, you know, I don't know about you, but I have had really brilliant ideas that were wrong.

MITCHELL: Yeah of course. Yeah.

CHARLIE: I won't list them all. I don't want to bore the audience, but yeah.

MITCHELL: Well, thanks so much, Charlie. Yeah. Super insightful conversation. Yeah, thank you for writing your book. I would definitely recommend it, The North Atlantic Cities, worth reading, really really insightful and yeah just thanks for getting on the call with us today. I really appreciate it.

CHARLIE: Oh, well, thank you. I think it's really cool. And I just want to say that what I've seen of your work on your website makes me want to come out and look at it. If I turn up on your doorstep someday, would you object to that?

MITCHELL: Sure yeah, go for it. Come on out!

CHARLIE: Yeah. All righty.

MITCHELL: If we show up in Baltimore, we may come and bother you and ask us to show us to some Row Homes. But…

CHARLIE: I know where to find some.

MITCHELL: Okay. If somebody wants to reach out to you and contact you, ask you questions, or get in touch with any of the organizations you work with, can you give us a way to contact you?

CHARLIE: Sure. Best way is email. Charles B Duff. That's Duff is D-U-F-F. And there's a letter B in the middle of it. No, no spaces at Outlook.com. charlesbduff@outlook.com. And I will try to reply. If, you know, Mitchell, I don't know how big your audience is. If I get deluged and I just can't reply to all of them I’ll say, help, Mr. Wizard, but I will do the best I can.

MITCHELL: Of course. And then any organizations that you want to mention, that you work with or support?

CHARLIE: For 40 years I ran a thing called Jubilee Baltimore and they're always fun to keep up with. My second in command is now the first in command. I'm now the old guy in the corner at a charitable foundation in Baltimore. So, they don't pay me, and I don't pay rent. And, it's a lot like working, but it's different. It’s great fun. So, Jubilee Baltimore, if you're interested in England, check out Create Streets and then the Council for the New Urbanism. I don't know, those are the first things that come to mind.

If you like, I'll take you around the rowhouse neighborhoods of Washington, DC. I think Washington is second only to Amsterdam among the North Atlantic cities for sheer artistic beauty. And, you know, there's got to be a better way than that.

MITCHELL: Yeah. Will do, will do. Thank you,

CHARLIE: Great. Thanks so much

MITCHELL: Thanks again Charlie, really appreciate it.

CHARLIE: Thanks so much.

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Connect with Charles Duff |

• Email | charlesbduff@outlook.com

• The North Atlantic Cities

• Jubilee Baltimore

• Create Streets

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