Charles R. (Chuck) Wolfe, M.R.P., J.D. provides a unique perspective about cities as both a long time writer about urbanism worldwide and an attorney in Seattle, where he focuses on land use and environmental law and permitting. In particular, his work involves the use of sustainable development techniques and innovative land use regulatory tools on behalf of both the private and public sectors. He is also an Affiliate Associate Professor in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, where he teaches land use law at the graduate level. He contributes regularly to several publications including Planetizen, CityLab/The Atlantic Cities, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Grist, seattlepi.com, and Crosscut.com. He blogs at myurbanist.com.
The city lives in many online fora. A new one, Citytank, assembled and launched today by Seattle’s Dan Bertolet, is well worth noting.
Bertolet has assembled a wide range of local and national contributors to write in a focused fashion on the potential of cities, as a conceivable predicate for a true “think tank” on applied urban ideas.
The inaugural series, “C200” features a range of 200 word contributions—required reading for both ethereal and pragmatic “urbies” online.
Much of today’s urbanist dialogue features dueling claims to universal messages, which no one should own.
Through his creation, Bertolet has implicitly acknowledged this communal power of ideas, and has pledged to assemble the best.
On March 8, Professor Edward Glaeser, a currently popular author on the subject of cities, applied his template for success to Seattle in a New York Timesblog piece. He found our city to exemplify an ideal urban model, a former one-industry wonder now both economically varied and culturally cerebral.
According to Glaeser, we avoided Detroit on Puget Sound–with brains, a diverse, innovative economy, building height and the reach and influence of the University of Washington.
Glaeser’s piece is great press—the stuff of boosterism and for use as evidence in corner of higher education, in the face of looming budget cuts in Olympia.
But the essay lacks the essence of Seattle from the street, the qualitative sense of the city’s success from the look and feel of direct and knowing experience. It only hints at the personal interaction and bond with where we have chosen to live, or are destined to stay.
So, to offset the glory of Microsoft and Starbucks, Amazon and Nordstrom, apocryphal metrics and Glaeser’s convenient reference to fewer tall buildings than you might think, I decided to return to first principles and capture the authentic bustle of a March day.
The photograph above purposely compresses Seattle’s intensity, with the zoom lens illusion that three blocks are one, and that West Seattle is a hill above the downtown waterfront. Why? Because a populist article without an anchored essence is incomplete and calls for so much more than the notion that “smart people” come to a place and create a marketplace of wonders.
I have watched the city change since I was aware of cities, and wanted to imply change based on my own abstract dialogue with the local urban experience.
On this theme of relationship with built surroundings, I also reached out to a talented friend, a teacher and former lawyer-turned writer in New York City, Annie Q. Syed, and asked for her best “prose of place”. She did not disappoint, and suggested her remarkable rejoinder to the classic E.B. White essay about New York City.
Simply entitled NYC, Syed begins with the compelling “New York City is an impractical, yet awe-inspiring, relationship you cannot quit”.
Syed’s one sentence, the rest of her always integral, personal words, and a photo-based urban walk at rush hour reminds me once again: In the city, we cannot live by social science alone.
Surely every self-styled urban visionary, and quotation-centric student of prose, knows the magic words attributed to monumental, “city beautiful” Chicago architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.“
A recent case-in-point came two years ago, when President Obama invoked Burnham in his inspirational speech, urging expansion of high-speed rail in America.
There is nothing wrong with such inspiration based on large visions and diligence. But, Burnham’s words need updating in order to communicate enhancement of sustainable cities in the digital age.
Here is a start, with five alternative slogans, and why we should use them:
Make no long speeches, nor write articles of more than 800 words.
You know the score: the digital age has amplified the art of efficient consumption. To sell today’s message of the critical relationship of land use and transportation, jobs close to home and multi-modal forms of transit, punchlists are in, treatises out.
Make no statements or share no photos that cannot also be tweeted or communicated by Facebook status message.
Any successful urban adage, such as “@mayorsmith: we need form-based zoning in Anytown”, needs to be, well, what you just read.
Make no introduction of a new initiative without a youtube or vimeo video with catchy music and pedestrians.
Introducing a complete streets program or sidewalk dining? Flip camera in hand, or you lose.
Make no statement about small business without allowing for street food and vegetables grown on adjacent parking strips.
It’s not about dining rooms or produce sections of supermarkets anymore.
Make no mention of children without poll results revealing no desire to grow up to a family car or a house, but to zipcars and downtown living.
No elaboration needed.
Tongue-in-cheek? Of course, but with a not-so-subtle message. In today’s America, we need even more New Age Burnhamisms in the quest to communicate urbanist messages with a populist voice.
Aristotle said that a soul never thinks without a picture.
He must have meant a picture of a city, because, in humanistic response to today’s pragmatic world of policy, regulation and urbanist proclamations, I often remember an August 12, 2006 photograph taken with a Nikon D-200 traded away long ago.
The camera is gone, but the image of Spinola Bay, St. Julian’s, Malta lives on, even as filtered and set to music here last July.
The reason is simple. The photograph suggests straightforward and ideal balances as follows:
A balance of color, of dark and light;
A balance of people, of land, water and sky;
A balance of automobile, boat and pedestrian commingling and observing;
A balance of residence, employment and compactness that seems not only to work, but to extol like a poster the virtues of urban life;
And, finally, a balance that much of today’s contemporary urban examination and discussions prescribe anew.
In a portrait of a former small fishing village, and now a literal reflection of dwellings, shops and restaurants in an island country, there is buried not only a treatise, but a novel and a fantastical place to dream.
