After reading Eric de Place’s commendable mini-history of the “War on Cars” in Sightline last week, I started thinking about an alternate reality, where humans do things differently, like somehow delivering heavy, bulky items without reliance on motorized vehicles.
What would that look like?
It would look like Seattle 105 years ago.
Thanks to Sherman Clay, Seattle (via Oscar Spidahl) for photo use.
Does the messaging which encourages sustainable forms of development need to alter its vocabulary to be successful?
Yesterday, Wednesday, January 5, I presented on removing barriers to transit-oriented development, sustainable communities and brownfields to a group of real estate lawyers from around the country assembled for a continuing legal education conference in Vail, Colorado.
The presentation is embedded below, and addresses in summary form the range of design, regulatory, fiscal and political issues in metropolitan areas today (with a Washington State focus). Yesterday, it was presented as the basis for a post-recession vocabulary for lawyers as well as clients and peer professionals.
Formal and casual discussion after the presentation was informative. We talked about the ongoing challenge of implementing compact and infill development adjacent to transportation infrastructure. Topics included infrastructure funding, urban streetcar initiatives, and how to address elements of walkable, transit-oriented development to constituencies not initially familiar with urbanist concepts or supportive of increased density.
Some in the audience suggested alternative language to mask hot-button words. Tax-increment financing to fund new infrastructure for transit-oriented development became a “parking fund”. Density was acknowledged as forever outside of some people’s comfort zone. And new neighborhoods aimed at live-work proximity were discussed as sometimes problematic in light of potential restrictions imposed by competing forms of environmental governance such as stormwater and air quality regulation.
I was reminded of twenty years ago, when drafting rural cluster development ordinances designed to protect natural resources. To some “cluster” meant “clutter’. We needed to call such regulations something else–such as “conservation density subdivisions”–to make them acceptable in many venues.
All in all, yesterday’s post-presentation discussions were illuminating in their own right, in response to provocative themes–and a reminder of the importance of holistic dialogue in the evolution from well-meaning dogma to achievable professional and political consensus.
Blog posts can be notorious both for novelty and content, and therefore downright experimental.
In that spirit, live at 35,000 feet, here is a question. Is the sky the place, or the high density, city-microcosm within the airplane cabin?
(Posted while airborne, January 3).
Last September, in reclaiming the urban memory , myurbanist profiled legendary photographer Burton Holmes, his dramatic imagery, international travelogue presentations and the implications of his work for today’s urbanism.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Holmes’ urban chronicles also had a domestic element, which centered on the New York skyline, and his classic, breathtaking city view.
Bearing an apt explorer’s moniker, his New York apartment on the west side of Central Park was called “Nirvana”. Not unlike his depictions of urban scenes abroad, Holmes once described–and photographed– the “wondrous” perspective on city life looking out from his home base:
Some day I will attempt a lecture on New York City, a subject no lecturer possessed of half an eye or half a tongue could really fail to put across to an audience.
Thinking thus, I gaze from my own apartment windows which look down on Central Park. I see beyond that spacious playground…
Who in all the world could not be thrilled by such a sight as all this.
–Burton Holmes, as quoted by Genoa Caldwell in The Man Who Photographed the World, 1977
Under copyright of the Burton Holmes Historical Collection (BHHC), here is Holmes’ photo, surveying Central Park South, and, by special permission from BHHC, newly enhanced with dimensions of music and motion.
Our goal? To complement Holmes’ already remarkable words, images and urban portrayals, in order to further focus the senses on all that a city can be.
Original photograph ©2006 BHHC, enhanced by myurbanist. Restricted use. Do not copy.
Yes, I know that the authors of the Planetizen-based children’s book, Where Things are From Near to Far found my childhood idol lacking, noting how my favorite frog was outdated and “really trumpeted zoning as the ‘be all and end all’ of the development of cities”.
After all, the perceived shortcomings of the 1952 Neighbor Flap Foot, The City Planning Frog helped motivate Steins and Halbur to produce their own book on urban planning for children in 2008.
But those of us who grew up as children of urban planning professors, the words of of an obscure frog from long ago resonate anew in the age of compact development.
Consider the closing exercise in the book, after Flap Foot says goodbye for the winter:
Perhaps you and a group of your friends could plan ways to improve your neighborhood. You might want to build a model neighborhood, using boxes for houses , stores and other buildings. Draw BEFORE and AFTER pictures. Take BEFORE and AFTER snapshots of places in the neighborhood that you could work together to improve.
Do neighbors meet in your school in the evening? For fun and social affairs? Make a list of the places in your neighborhood where people can meet. Do you have playgrounds within a five-minute walk from your house? Are they safe enough for a little four-year old to reach by himself?
See if your COULD BE neighborhood has all that Flap Foot told Mickey a good neighborhood should have.
–Ewald and Henrickson, Neighbor Flap Foot, the City Planning Frog
Indeed, it could be that Neighbor Flap Foot will stage a comeback in the New Year.