This background has been recently summarized elsewhere, but it is instructive to roll back time, and roll it forward again.
From Timothy Egan–in 1993:
Category: urban administration
guerrilla urbanism and the shoe from history
Following several recent entries on urbanist “quick wins”, local urban greening and reclaiming alleys, we’ve been increasingly aware of the new “guerrilla urbanism”. The concept is particularly showcased in Jeffrey Hou’s new book, Insurgent Public Space Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities.
In his book, Hou, the Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, sets out 20 case studies–from gardening to parking lot spaces turned parks–to illustrate the growing trend of nontraditional life-giving to otherwise unused city spaces.
But what of the symbols of such contemporary movements, such as the spade, or better yet, the shoe? We posed an interesting question about pedestrian and open space advocacy on Facebook this morning.
Premised on the embedded link below, is shoe-banging ipso facto pedestrian advocacy? Do the ends justify the means?
the news cycle and the states of city streets
Increasingly, everyday seems like “a day of the street”.
Today, as part of a feature series on recent mayoral “state of the city” speeches, Planner’s Web highlights Minneapolis, where in his address last month Mayor R.T. Rybak stressed that city’s “Great Streets” program, a coordinated funding assistance effort to ensure success of businesses located adjacent to commercial corridors and nodes.
Coincidentally, in Seattle, a broad campaign (citing, inter alia, Minneapolis) launched, with the goal of offsetting comprehensive funding shortfalls for Seattle street reinvention:
We believe that walking, bicycling and transit should be the easiest means of transportation in Seattle. But our current situation is that we face cuts in Metro service hours and we’re not funding the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plans that are needed for our future.
Our coalition has identified a number of potential funding sources – to the tune of $30 million dollars – for walking, biking and transit infrastructure. And we look forward to working with the Seattle City Council, Mayor McGinn and our partners to create dedicated funding mechanisms for multi-modal transportation initiatives in Seattle.
We also look forward to engaging the entire city of Seattle in a conversation about how we fund and build the pedestrian, bicycle and transit infrastructure that aligns with our vision; this year, and into the future.
Here is an embedded link to the new coalition effort, which, at last review, garnered 267 Facebook fans in just over 24 hours:
Seattle as medieval city?
In the May 2010 Seattle Magazine, Editor-at-Large Knute Berger uses myurbanist (see clue #4) as one piece of evidence that Seattle is heading towards a “new medievalism”. Uh-oh.
integrating silos, one property at a time
On one parcel of land, below, we see urban freight mobility across difficult topography and provisional sewer and garbage collection: Property-scale, integrated infrastructure!
Can this be achieved at the urban and regional scales in a sustainable fashion? Time will tell.
