the option of sensing the city

On September 11, 2014September 20, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, place decoding, placemaking, urban juxtapositions, urban views, urbanism without effort, vignettesLeave a comment

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

How do we decipher this story? — How do we decipher this story of port-side people, buildings, and who lives where? Which senses are key?

Place Decoding: Moving Beyond the Directed Experience

Sensing the city is a personal experience owned by each of us. From a legal perspective, it is an urban property right that transcends public and private domains. It is a form of place-decoding that deserves more illustration and attention.

To see and smell the city is an affordable lease, easement or license across space and time, and it is too easily manipulated by other forces, such as intentional design or the accretion of organic forces of growth or decline.

One critical element of place-decoding is understanding who, respectively, are the leaders and followers in the urban experiential adventure.

My ongoing work in France (outlined here) reminds me that this form of place-decoding is critical to each of our experiences, but it is not easy to capture without treating urban places as classrooms for exploration. This may explain why we often choose to institutionalize the path of least resistance (such as yielding to a directed response or championing others’ essays on the zen of walking and biking), rather than foster self-directed efforts to allow each of us to realize our own sensations and experiences.

The Directed Example

In Grasse, Provence, street odors are changeable near the Fragonard parfumerie. Why? Because an Orwellian, directed scent, as illustrated below, dispenses fragrance across a narrow, pedestrian street. Shoppers, caught in post-hypnotic strolls, cannot escape the medieval, odor-masking reality of perfume’s very purpose.

In this case, a deodorant of the street manipulates the observer, externally directing the right to experience described above. The urban observer has no cognitive choice other than to leave, or ignore the smell.

Context Through the Minds’s Eye

In the multi-layered city such as Bastia, Corsica, small pockets of old blend with the new, and lines of sight span the ages and associated technologies.

As shown below, in the two images below, a glance at topography can show either a hill town setting in isolation, a traffic-laden city, or both. One person may see historic urban form up the hill. Another may see a roundabout of automobiles in context, with little regard to the pre-spawl relic above.

Here, the urban observer has more choice than in the Grasse example to sense for oneself, and more readily understand the mind’s eye.

Summary

I’ve said before that we should pay more attention to the place-receivers of placemaking, through encouraging urban diaries that lead us all to better understand where we live, work and travel between. However appropriate the urbanist purpose, we cannot rest simply with the cutting edge, activist goals of bus and bicycle without a more holistic, experiential point of view.

I believe part of the answer is simply enhancing people’s ability to sense the city. More apps, tools and activities all go without saying; examples include Adelaide, Australia’s well-presented “Picture Adelaide 2040” project, Stage 1 of which centers on gathering 1000 stories from citizens (each with a photo) on how they use their favorite urban places.

But “how-to’s”, such as community classes, meet-ups, school curricula, training of political officials and sensitizing of loan officers is also what I have in mind.

We can urge our political leaders, our planners, our designers and real estate professionals that encouraging people to sense the city deserves a high priority in policies, plans and pro-formas. Better cities will not result from a mandated smell this, or see that mindset.

Rather, better cities are more apt to happen if we first learn how to smell and see, a Place-Decoding 101 class affordable to all.

Coming next: How walking between towns decodes the elements of place.

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

place-decoding the elements of urbanism

On September 2, 2014September 20, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, place decoding, placemaking, sustainability, urban views, urbanism without effort22 Comments

First in a series of illustrated ruminations from the South of France.

According to the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen, France is struggling with changing times, including how perception of classic physical space is evolving as the role of cyberspace expands. Ambiguities range from the changing nature of central State political power, to the incongruous starting place of Tour de France 2014: not in France but in England.

As Cohen wrote in early July about one prospective premise for the current French struggle with modernity:

[N]owhere else is the particularity of place and the singularity of a person’s attachment to it more important.

In continuing my focus on the baselines of today’s urbanism, Cohen’s apt statement explains why I am writing on an occasional basis from France through November. There is nowhere better, in my opinion, to see the old world basis for the role of urban places, and how they define who we are in the urban context.

In the narrow streets and pass-through places of old world urban cores, latent answers to urban riddles await our quizzical view. These answers are worthy of histories, sensational fiction and last, but not least, the inquiry of urbanists.

Consider a Dan Brown approach to the study of cities, something we could easily call “place-decoding”.

Place-decoding, like the Urbanism Without Effort I have written about before, is the necessary prerequisite to placemaking going forward. The observational lessons of place-decoding illustrate embedded patterns within the urban form. Many such patterns need notice and forethought based on their precedent and inevitable recurrence.

We need only a few late summer photographs from the historic center of Aix-en-Provence and the small Corsican port of Erbalunga to further set the tone.

Each photograph suggests an element of placemaking for further consideration, around which a city will grow (as shown by surrounding modern development only a stone’s throw away).

Each shows latent human behavior and natural and market forces in process—all of which can lead to consequent debates about policies, plans and regulations.

Require setbacks to preserve light and air? Assure safe passage for the elderly? Honor the walkable places of the past, present and future? Foster successful interactions of private business and public ways? Create safety at all hours for street diners and children at play?

We will not find the answers to these questions in solely the printed word, or in assumed approaches to urban life. Rather, these are the riddles of the old world worth illustrating and asking again, in places where their inspiration remains on eternal display—begging for rediscovery, decoding and translation to modern life.

Coming next: a model for altering human senses in a public space

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

timeless or time-bound in the city?

On August 18, 2014February 25, 2024 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views, vignettes2 Comments

Take away context clues, and cities become more interesting matrices—with blank cells to complete—where each of us personalizes how space meets time.

A uniform filter applied to multiple urban scenes can easily warp time and location, and obscure—yet somehow enhance—the reality of place.

This simple premise informs our point of view about city life. For every image, topic or discipline, our values and belief systems inform what we see, especially when familiar guideposts get filtered away.

Remove color, crop, leave only hint and nuance, and the city can become an off-trail place where inquiry is a form of intellectual rescue and rediscovery.

In the ten examples below, five questions set the tone for this rediscovery process:

Is it apparent when the photo occured?
Is the location clear? If so, is such clarity based on personal familiarity with the location?
Is the context of the scene readily understandable? What more would be needed to offer a more complete answer to questions of when and where?
Which element of urban life seems the most important to the composition (e.g. safety, environment, mode of transportation, role of public space, public/private interface)?
What questions remain?

The answers are for each of us to develop and consider, but one message stands out. Take apart the most fundamental things we see everyday. Inquire, and on the rebound, literally and figuratively, each of us will see things in a whole new light.

An interesting footnote: I captured all photos above between 2010 and 2014, on four different continents. During test runs on Facebook, several people commented that most of the photos looked dated, and many did not believe that I was the photographer, nor Lightroom the robber of color.

Perhaps ironically, the city featured the most (Seattle), is barely 160 years old. The second-to-last photo (Jerusalem) belies simultaneous claims of place dating back thousands of years. Yet the antique filter creates equal partners in the rediscovery process.

The other photos show, inter alia, how a shopping gallery floor (Sydney) still projects a historic building’s nineteenth century pattern, how London streets and former Lisbon fairgrounds are both fair game for blended bicycle traffic, and how a classic older car (Minneapolis) can cast a retro-era feel on an entire intersection.

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

activating common sense in the city

On August 6, 2014August 6, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views, vignettesLeave a comment

An entry in the new series, depicting the common sense dimensions of urban places

Around the world, the sit-able city (a new term that I termed here last October for an age-old concept) increasingly surrounds us, whether installed to honor ongoing, traditional cultural norms, or interposed more aggressively on an experimental basis to encourage safe participation in downtown life.

The above two images show, sequentially, each installation alternative, first, in Porto, Portugal, and, second, in Seattle, Washington.

Do the relative purposes of the benches, tables and chairs shown here really matter, as much as the results themselves? After all, the scenes seem to show use-as-intended, whatever the purpose.

I suggest that there is a distinction, with lessons learned.

While the first, Portuguese image shows a modern moment in a long-term way of life, the second, Seattle example reflects a more portable undertaking; part of a recent, purposeful activation of downtown space, a joint effort of the City and the Downtown Seattle Association.

Some would champion this Seattle example as another instance of a tactical urbanism intervention, and call it a day. But I think a more fundamental point merits an ironic mention.

There is often nothing new in common sense human endeavors, planned or otherwise. What will work going forward is, very simply, often what has worked before.

Images composed by the author in Porto, Portugal, in May 2012, and, in Seattle, Washington, in July, 2014. 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.

clarifying urban property rights, without effort

On August 4, 2014August 4, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, pedestrianism, placemaking, politics, urban views, vignettesLeave a comment

An entry in the new series, depicting the common sense dimensions of urban places

In today’s shareable city, there are some things—like driveway access—that are difficult for many people to surrender to chance. In this case, the means of communication, both inadvertent and direct, caught my eye for inclusion in this “common sense” series.

Over a year after publication of Urbanism Without Effort, I still come upon memorable, unique images of small-scale urban representations of standard human fare. In this instance, near dusk, my Sony A7S recorded a simple, private rights assertion next to public rights of way.

Consider this adaptation of what could well be a leftover holiday lawn ornament, a likely award winner in a conjectural “you can’t make this stuff up” competition.

As I’ve said many times: The urbanism we already have is often the best urbanism of all.

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

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Category: everyday urbanism