why the ‘finesse of the avenue’ is what cities need

On October 5, 2014October 7, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, place decoding, placemaking, sustainability, urban views, urbanism without effort2 Comments

Fourth in an illustrated series about place-decoding from the South of France.

The Finesse of the Avenue

Last month in Cassis, the Avenue Victor Hugo told the stories surrounding its pavement and curbs. People walked the Avenue, between a small square-with-fountain and the quay, while the trees, awnings and overhangs together cast the shadows that passers-by always need. The shiny, at-angle paving stones reflected the light in ways seldom seen on a street. And ambient noise seemed pleasant and appropriate, muffled perhaps by the envelope of finesse just described.

My experience in Cassis was a major reminder, about how several factors can combine to create a “finesse of the avenue”; a noteworthy confluence of people—both natives and tourists— of physical aspects of the urban environment, and of the human senses of sight and sound.

In short, natural, built and human factors merged in a perfect storm of light, trees, stones and scale.

But, of course, it was not a storm at all. It was an exemplary venue to practice the “place decoding” called for in my three earlier series entries.

The Human Impact of a Simple Fix

While Cassis is known as a fishing village turned touristic haven (and a departure point for dramatic rock faces above the Mediterranean and remarkable inlets along coast, a short distance from Marseille), this essay is hardly a travelogue.

Rather, it focuses on the human impact of one of the simplest and most common municipal interventions: Closure of a street to automobiles on Market Day, or during times of heavy use of a place (in this case, to board tour boats or visit the beach on a September Saturday). As a result, inherent and longstanding qualities of the place re-emerge for the people.

The two sets of photos below show Cassis with full automobile access, off-season (via Google Street View), and on that September late morning, when I photographed street use at a more human scale. Comparing the two, it is not difficult to distinguish the ho-hum on the left from the right hand’s finesse of the avenue.

The placemaking movement has already marshaled the festival imagery implied here. We know that medieval townscapes and small streets are not a precursor to experiments that allow the value of public spaces and mix and re-enable non-motorized transportation modes. Transformations such as New York City’s Times Square pedestrian plaza are increasingly well-known, on their way to best practice status for our cities and towns.

The Role of Magic and Finesse in Urban Definition

In a place like Cassis, however, it’s more than cutting off the cars.

Some places have magic elements that combine in unique, empowering ways that inordinately impact the urban experience. I have written about those special locales in Urbanism Without Effort, and inferred associated people-based criteria of comfort and scale. Just as those criteria became clear for me in London’s Neal’s Yard, and parts of Portland, Oregon’s small, cohesive downtown blocks, they reemerged with vigor in the Cassis experience.

The additional ten images below show the essentials of everyday life, carried out in public, with comfort and apparent ease. While some are walking, others are selling, shopping, reading, attending to pets, or each other. These essentials stand out amid the merger of private and public, and the temporary compromise of the automobile. The “envelope of finesse” of light, trees, shade and reflection described above, worked a magic aura, in my opinion, without over-designed intervention.

Communicating this “finesse of the avenue” is as valuable as the scholars and thought leaders’ views about successful urban attributes. Places with the look and feel of Avenue Victor Hugo, if interpreted in context, illustrate successful attributes of urban public spaces, and help define the infrastructure and services that cities should equitably provide. It’s a gut-level, observational process, which every one of us has the means to carry out, to better understand the underlying make-up of successful city life.

Images composed by the author in Cassis, Provence, France, with the exception of the indicated Google Street View comparison photographs. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.

Coming next: Lessons in Housing from the Domaine of the Caravan.

For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

cities and the plot: stay tuned

On October 4, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, environmental and land use law, everyday urbanism, infill development, lessons learned, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urbanism without effortLeave a comment

For five years, myurbanist has focused on the organic, naturally occurring aspects of urban development and placemaking. Several myurbanist entries became the basis for last year’s Urbanism Without Effort (Island Press, 2013).

This year, based on introductions from friends and through social media, I’ve collaborated with the Urban Design Studies Unit at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on common interests, including ideas about the latent length of main streets throughout history.

Later this month, the collaboration continues, with the Plot-Based Urbanism Summit in Glasgow, commencing October 27. The Summit will focus on strategies and examples emphasizing foundational, close-grain urban fabrics that were once the premise of urban development and associated street networks. In particular, the Summit will address the fundamental role of the individual “plot” in urban development.

My keynote will stress the “first principles of urbanism” discussed many times here and in Urbanism Without Effort, and suggest basic implementation strategies. I very much look forward to the range of related subjects covered in panels convened by leading United Kingdom proponents of the plot-based approach.

See the following programme for more, and look for updates here and on Twitter, under the hashtag #PBUrb14.

#PBUrb14: Plot-Based Urbanism Summit Programme, Glasgow, October 27, 2014 by myurbanist

‘inevitably urban’ and the role of the people

On September 29, 2014September 29, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban abstractions, urban views, urbanism without effort, vignettes6 Comments

Inevitable Urban Times

These times seem so inevitably urban. Of course, my wry remark comes from a city-dweller in a post-recessionary Seattle, where new construction appears at every turn.

Here, civic dialogue focuses on the social repercussions of growth, such as affordability of urban housing (“build more“, said yesterday’s Seattle Times), the proper range of housing types, and how residents will travel from here to there.

These are also times to think again about how to “create scalable solutions for city leaders to share with their constituencies across the world”, according to The Atlantic’s CityLab 2014 event underway now in Los Angeles.

Attention to human opportunities in the city is now commonplace, with recurring urbanism, placemaking and urban innovation events like CityLab 2014, The Placemaking Leadership Council and The Future of Places all occurring within the last month. Proffered solutions abound, aided by technology, applications and provocative presentations, both live and online.

Oratory and Shakespeare Define the City

But it’s worth remembering that inquiry about the how to fulfill human opportunities is longstanding. There is undeniable precedent in storied oratory, arguably the internet of ancient times.

The Greek poet, Alcaeus of Mytilene (680-511 BC) (as reported by Roman-era sophist Aelius Aristides in later oratory) established human opportunities as central to his definition of the city:

Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well builded, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men [sic] able to use their opportunity [emphasis added].

Sound familiar?

The human part of the built environment has echoed in other, much-quoted prose. Beyond the Greek sophists and orators (themselves criticized for educating only those who could afford the price), Shakespeare’s better known quotation, from Coriolanus, Act 3, Scene 1, also set the tone:

“What is the city but the people?”

What I Learned About Cities

In my case, personal background complements history.

In one of his last presentations, at a major “21st Century City” conference he helped organize in 1988 in Phoenix, my father (late Urban Planning Professor Myer R. Wolfe) quoted Alcaeus in his holistic conference keynote remarks.

How, he asked, can interdisciplinary forces be marshaled to make an accessible urban form (citing Alcaeus’ human “opportunities”) for the 21st century? “The question has to be asked—opportunities for what?”, he noted, pointing to, inter alia, limitations on quality of life inherent in long commutes and related life choices, issues of density v. intensity, as well as urban character across both urban and suburban patterns. (See The City of the 21st Century, M. Pihlak, Ed., Arizona State University, 1988).

In reviewing those remarks just yesterday, his references both to Greek oratory and his predictive questions about this century sent me searching for universal, human imagery. Because it’s the people who define the city, we should look at them, closely.

It’s the People, Stupid

I have compiled 25 photographs for this essay—taken in multiple locations since 2009, including cities on four continents. The photographs are presented in black and white, to better show the contrast between the human and built environment, yet also emphasize the undeniably symmetry between.

My intentions are simple:

First, I want to straightforwardly illustrate fundamental traits of city dwellers across cultures, distance and time. Such traits include talking, eating, singing, watching, shopping, walking, sitting, learning, growing and aging, seeking shelter from climate, and blending with technologies of communication, travel and illumination.

Second, beyond the other ample media available to assess city life and prospects, I want to challenge the reader to think about how best to maximize the opportunities for those pictured, and those around us, and to realistically assess what we see.

As explained here, this story of “urban inevitability” has traveled through sophism—a once-revered (albeit privileged) form of teaching, across the ages. But the very point of such sophism—defining the city on human terms—should not morph to “sophistry”, a more modern term reflective of deceit and specious debate.

Finally, Just Look at the People and Learn

Here’s hoping that the interspersed photographs above and below will illustrate what Alcaeus meant long ago, as revisited in 1988 by my father and in new forms, through the gatherings and events today.

I would venture that to be “able to use the opportunity” of the city is a perpetual challenge best observed in the conduct of the users themselves.

Images composed by the author in Antibes, Arles, Frejus, Grasse and Nice, France; Tel Aviv, Israel; London, UK; Aveiro, Lisbon and Porto, Portugal; Arusha, Tanzania, and Seattle, USA. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.

For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

decoding the place between places

On September 19, 2014September 20, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, place decoding, placemaking, sustainability, urban juxtapositions2 Comments

Third in an illustrated series about place-decoding from the South of France.

Today, many promote urban walkability, but for several years, I have focused on inter-urban, or, even inter-settlement walkability. Strolls through such “places between” not only highlight the virtues of walking itself, but also invoke the universal transitions between distinct locales and the amorphous rural countryside.

Understanding the blend between built and natural, including how balances change closer to clustered settlement, is key to defining sustainable cities going forward.

New urbanists seized on this notion long ago and built new approaches to planning and zoning around the borrowed biological principle of the “transect“. But my purpose here is more observational and humanistic, and to illustrate the dynamic of the “places between” in the context of the “place-decoding” approach that I began exploring earlier this month.

Between towns, it seems there is always a microcosm of similar characteristics defining the edge of urbanity.

Last year I wrote about a Washington State perspective in the Palouse region on the Idaho border, and stressed dissection of the farm-to-market basis for why and how many cities grew, and the reasons forests and farms have been elemental to growth management legislation. I suggested that modern legislative approaches essentially emulate the naturally evolved agricultural region that has always surrounded the City of Rome.

But, as the Rome reference suggests, I believe that inter-urban walkability often resonates best outside of the United States, between towns that grew up at a walkable distance between each other—unremarkably in a mountain valley—or along roads left from civilizations where armies marched home along routes where country became city or town along the way.

One example invokes Rome again. In my Urbanism Without Effort book talks, I like to relate the “Via Appia Method” of place decoding. Take a train several kilometers out from Rome, and walk into the city through regional parkland on the Via Appia, and witness 2000 years of human universals along the way. Burial places of old merge with suburban villas and tourist buses, agriculture and greenbelts abut now over-trafficked country roads.

Another example is farther north in Italy. I’ve also written about the “essence of urbanism” presented by the Cinque Terre towns of Liguria, joined by waterside pedestrian trail, and experienced the even more dramatic Sentiero d’egli dei through steep, cultivated Amalfi coast land between Positano and Amalfi.

And as a capstone last week, I observed the subtleties of the inter-settlement landscape in and around Quenza and Zonza—two proximate small Southern Corsican mountain towns of the Alta Rocca with populations of some 200 and 2000 inhabitants, respectively. A five-hour loop hike between Quenza, a small, declining-in-population village, and Zonza, a more touristic, mountain sports-oriented focal point, invited place-decoding of the microcosm outlined above: From artifacts of religion to agriculture to the cemeteries and leave-behinds that classically occur at the edge of town.

Last year, in the Palouse, I underscored how the elements of older, rural America have reappeared in today’s cities, noting how “small markets, the local bar, the library and the school — no longer needed in one context, they rise again in reinvented urban settings…”.

And last week on Corsica, walking to and from the place between places, I read human fundamentals, as illustrated in the images presented here, in a way that even more firmly decodes and illustrates the elements of urban settlement.

The ebb and flow of nature, economic base and the passage of time are always ripe for observation. Below, take note of one walk’s illustration of two towns, their edges and the spaces between.

The natural transect, the moniker of urban transition

Agriculture, cemeteries and abandoned vehicles on the urban edge—an organic zoning without effort

Fences/property division: an indicator that at some point, the commons disappeared

Religious structures are definitional in Quenza, this one for 1000 years

Zonza, renewed commerce at the core

Tourism is the new economy of survival in rough, now recreational terrain

Images composed by the author along the Via Appia entering Rome, and in Quenza and Zonza, Corsica, France. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.

Coming next: Decoding the elements of a street in Cassis.

For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

public space in motion, from Nice, France

On September 12, 2014September 12, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, lessons learned, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, vignettesLeave a comment

On Saturday, September 13, the 2014 multi-day (and always provocative) Seattle Design Festival features a “Public Space in Motion” panel.

Here, almost live from France, is the panel’s opening presentation:

myurbanist

Category: everyday urbanism

why the ‘finesse of the avenue’ is what cities need

The Finesse of the Avenue

The Human Impact of a Simple Fix

The Role of Magic and Finesse in Urban Definition

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cities and the plot: stay tuned

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‘inevitably urban’ and the role of the people

Inevitable Urban Times

Oratory and Shakespeare Define the City

What I Learned About Cities

It’s the People, Stupid

Finally, Just Look at the People and Learn

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decoding the place between places

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public space in motion, from Nice, France

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The Finesse of the Avenue

The Human Impact of a Simple Fix

The Role of Magic and Finesse in Urban Definition

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Like this:

Inevitable Urban Times

Oratory and Shakespeare Define the City

What I Learned About Cities

It’s the People, Stupid

Finally, Just Look at the People and Learn

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