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.
If you never saw Francis Ford Coppola’s Koyaanisqatsi, a 1982 production depicting our environmental impact on the planet (directed by Godfrey Reggio), it is now available online and can be seen from the embedded link below. Borrowing from a Hopi indian term for “life out of balance”, the documentary film begins with unspoiled natural environments and progresses through manmade turmoil. The film remains one of the best one-sitting exposures to the consequences of unsustainable practices and continues to argue, without words, for an unfailing, new sustainability ethic.
After the movie, observe the best communal setting you can find in your city, and ask how we’ve changed.
Today, Kaid Benfield (via his friend Steve Davis) reminded us that features of new walkable livability initiatives have small town roots, casting rural-based opposition to the White House’s urban agenda as ironically ill-founded.
If accessed by a small town-style walk, could drive-ins turned pedestrian and soda fountain artifacts become the town squares of our urban future?
An April 4 Detroit Free Presseditorial issued a call to action: Start now to implement the “brimming with hope” principles that could reinvent Detroit by 2020.
When you assemble all the proposals, plans and dreams that have been advanced in recent months, the city of 2020 looks dramatically different than it looks today: smaller, smarter, greener, more mobile, with more job opportunities — and once again the pounding heart of a metropolitan region.
You see thousands of kids attending schools that work for them. You see people using light rail and boarding buses in a transit system that serves them. You see a gleaming, growing medical complex; banners being hoisted to the rafters of a new sports arena; and people tending little farms that nourish their neighborhoods in more ways than one. You see convention-goers strolling a crowded RiverWalk and bicyclists coasting the downhills of a new trail network.
The editorial is a challenge not just to Detroit, but to America, consistent with the dreams of the urbanist generation.
As we wrote in Crosscut last October:
[W]e can learn from Detroit and other places where our worst urban fears have been realized. There, consolidation is demanded from chaos, and visionaries have emerged from the ruins.
This post has been updated and appears in the April 10, 2010 seattlepi.com, here.
Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem, in modern commercial context
The contextual evolution of Roman military crossroads often shows commercial street life as the latest overlay on the ancient castrum, its roads (decumanus and cardo) and intersections. Over time, a place of armies becomes a sociocultural place anew.
For instance, in Jerusalem, the legendary path to the cross coincides with the Roman decumanus. In Split, Croatia, the crossing of the decumanus and cardo in the old urban center shows remnants of the temples of the Dalmatian summer palace of the Emperor Diocletian.
In several entries, myurbanist has challenged American placemaking advocates to consider pragmatic approaches when borrowing from qualities of foreign urban spaces, recalling their evolution over thousands of years under different sociocultural circumstances. Likewise, the blog Emergent Urbanism recently cautioned to be mindful of the “patterns of place”.
In American efforts to move from the food court back to the street, we should consider first our own cultural context, and without political will, the tendency of traditional street use permitting and related, safety-based regulatory regimes to discourage more expansive public use of rights-of-way for nontraditional street and sidewalk use.
Certainly, policymakers, the development community and community leaders are gaining momentum through focus upon sidewalk dining ordinances, complete streets programming, and compact and walkable transit oriented developments. But in a time of recession and financial constraint, reinvention will not appear overnight, and allegiance to traditional regulatory schemes dies hard at the interface of public and private property lines.
In the short term, in the spirit of the “quick win” discussed before in the context of achievable placemaking in urban alleys, why not innovate even more?
Here’s another “quick win” idea, convertible to existing neighborhoods, large and small. Every Saturday morning, suspend the rules:
Create Sidewalk Saturdays.
How about a municipal ordinance offering temporary, no-fee public sidewalk use every Saturday morning for two hours, with removable tables, for small restaurants and coffee houses that can do so while allowing a walkable passage between storefront and street? How about such businesses offering noticeably reduced coffee, espresso drink and chocolate drink prices during these two hours for those who bring their own cups?
Would such an experiment work universally? Could it be done while meeting the needs of fire codes and related public safety and often complex insurance requirements? Would businesses uniformly reduce prices to further the American return to the livable street? Would we walk, bike, or take transit to sit streetside?
Can we achieve the evolution of the castrum in America? Whether we could implement a “quick win” like Sidewalk Saturdays would forecast success in implementing the “look and feel” from afar.
Human-scale public spaces create a sense of belonging and comfort. In a city, stumbling upon places like Neal’s Yard is undeniably special, and can create indelible memories which fit today’s dialogue of urbanism. This small courtyard, in London’s Covent Garden section, is home to holistic-health restaurants, shops and businesses–accessible through a narrow passage off of Monmouth Street–a reminder of why walking-oriented guides or articles are often the best “radar” for touring a city.
