An eclectic Provence window below introduces a back and forth conversation between American facades (to the left) and their counterparts (to the right), contrasting often uneventful stylistic reserve and usually empty balconies with traditions of rich color and plantings, angular perspectives and private spaces speaking outward to the street.
What if American cities legislated brighter color amid windows, balconies planted green and encouraged flags and hanging laundry? What if homeowner associations and rental contracts required vegetation and decoration of the interface with the street below?
For all of today’s urbanist dialogue about density, transit and proximity of home and work, an enhanced urban look and feel can also derive from practicing simple traditions of visual diversity.
Here’s a review and look forward, focused on the expanding redefinition of American urban spaces, such as sidewalks and streets, and a symbiotic recalibration of the flanking private domain.
An April 2010 myurbanist entry, “from ancient Rome to sidewalk Saturdays in America”, observed context and possibilities:
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.
We then proposed that every Saturday morning, American cities invoke a “quick win”, and allow temporary and selective sidewalk use for two hours. mindful of safety, yet relaxing of bureaucracy.
In the interim, American cities have continued to experiment with redefinitions of traditional uses of the public domain, including street closures, “parklets” in parking spaces and bicycle-oriented suspensions of ordinary traffic.
In particular, the mainstream press has featured coverage of the expansion of streetside dining in the Pacific Northwest premised on relaxed permitting requirements, and urbanist blogs have referenced growing American experimentation with the street as a dining venue.
What else is possible? Here, from afar, is more evidence that street and square, beach and byway all have a greater and unrealized multipurpose capacity, ripe for recalibration in ever-evolving America.
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This article also appeared on SustainableCitiesCollective, here, on November 4.
From a 1959 film that his been in the public domain for some time, a pre-urbanist look at the urbanist buzz…
Viewed from above, organic forms of settlement often echo the topography of place, display spontaneous patterns and converse with the sky.
