Many of us who write about cities like to share rediscovered videos from times gone by. The videos are especially notable when ideas with currency today are discussed in other contexts, providing opportunities to compare, contrast and sometimes be humbled by history.

Here is a prescient video from 1948, about “Charlie”. This cartoon protagonist champions the basics of the new town movement in post-war Great Britain—a Garden City-inspired effort intended to ease housing shortages. The first phases of the movement brought to the city planning lexicon names such as Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel-Hempstead, Harlow, Hatfield and Basildon (see Osborn and Whittick’s classic The New Towns (1963) for the full story).

An interesting tidbit: as the video explains, the “neighborhood centre” was a key premise of the British new towns—based on the guiding principles of the Reith Report as implemented through the New Towns Act of 1946.

Similar to then-contemporary American “neighborhood unit” principles, the new towns commonly featured structured neighborhoods of 5,000-10,000 inhabitants with at least one elementary school, local shops on two sides of a triangle or flanking a square with a church or public house.

What can we learn from the ever-optimistic Charlie (who ends the video on a bicycle)? Take a look at the video above, or review the script below, courtesy of the British National Archives:

Charlie: Our town was going to be a good place to work in, and a grand place to live in, with plenty of open spaces; parks, and playing fields where people could enjoy them, flower gardens, and of course there’d have to be an attractive town centre too, with plenty of room for folks to meet. Good shops, a posh theatre, cinemas, a concert hall, and a civic centre.

Chairman: We have to plan the residential area next. Let’s consider it as a series of neighbourhoods and take any one of them. Now – how shall we plan? Most important of all is the child. So we’ll need pedestrian routes for the pram-pusher. Nursery schools within 400 yards of every home. Primary schools within safe and easy reach. Each neighbourhood must have its own.

Voices: “Churches” “Community centre” “Shopping district” “And lots of pubs – right next door to me” (answer) “Oh no, you don’t.”

Chairman: Oh, there’ll be a pub quite near enough for you. And finally, we started on the houses. The site was planned for maximum sunshine and then everyone could take his choice.

Charlie: Detached houses – semi-detached – terraced houses. Flats for people who wanted them – hostels where the young folks could get together, and bungalows for the old ones.

And so we moved right in. I’m telling you – it works out fine; just you try it!

Modernize the script, and take away the industry-avoiding colonization of the hinterlands. Consider the neighborhood vision with jobs close to home. I would argue that the city neighborhoods sought by the creative class, multi-modal “Charlies” of today are nothing new, right down to the hoped-for micro-brew a short walk or bike ride away.

A similar version of this post first appeared in The Atlantic Cities.

While the Colorado Rockies saw long-awaited snow this weekend, depths remain historically low.  Signs caution of “early season” conditions (more typical of November),  yet the economic impact is still unclear—resort revenues benefitted from robust holiday traffic through New Year’s Day.

This background—a low snowpack and its potential impact on the economic base of resort towns—provides an ironic gloss to my annual presentation at a national continuing legal education conference in Aspen.

Hence, an unoriginal, yet salient question: What of cities and towns built on climate-dependent activities, and the consequences of over-dependence on consistent weather?

After all, enthusiastic, robust tenets of urbanism usually rely on similarly strong, underlying economies.

The presentation is embedded below, and addresses—in summary form—several urbanist ideals, as well as the interplay of market preferences and public policy initiatives in two key areas: redevelopment in concert with new transit infrastructure, and reuse of formerly contaminated properties within urban cores.

Understanding the Domain of the Urbanist Lawyer

Posts from 2009, 2010 and 201l comment on earlier January visits and presentations in Colorado..

Image and presentation composed by the author.

Recent reports and coverage show that the skyscraper is very much alive in the post-9/11 world, despite recession and lowrise alternatives to modern urban development.   Hence the timely release of consulting engineer Kate Ascher’s new book, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (Penguin Press, 2011), a remarkably plain-language reexamination of tall buildings in a sustainability-conscious age.

Ascher previously profiled the built environment, on a broader, more horizontal basis.  In The Works, in 2005, she examined New York City infrastructure in layperson’s terms, with similar, graphically rich precision.

Now, with the assumption that skyscrapers are both urban building blocks and small cities in themselves, she provides a necessary primer on the hows and whys of contained vertical settlement amid an otherwise horizontal landscape.

A telling hint from the outset:  The table of contents is a “directory” and the chapters display in reverse order, as if building floors, ascending, in elevator fashion, from introduction, through elements of constructability, function, maintenance, sustainability—and topping off with a look to the future.

The book is a remarkable confluence of coffee table display, children’s book fascination, and quick study fact-finding.

According to a reviewer, Ascher followed inspiration from David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work.  The Macaulay-like show and tell style predominates—but for grownups—as Dave Banks notes in Wired.

Full of color diagrams, perspectives and narrative detail, factoids abound.  Topics range from superstructure to building elements (e.g. glass, skin and steel), and include corollary systems (e.g. elevators, air conditioning, safety, fire prevention and energy conservation).

Among the learning: Ascher expects that Dubai’s Burj Khalifa will remain the world’s tallest building for a decade or more.  Yet, the last chapter predicts more of the same “supertall” examples, such as China’s pending, 121-story Shanghai Tower.

After summarizing approaches to reduced environmental footprint and diverse tower shapes, a last section, entitled “How Will We Live?”, entices the urbanist with predictions of the further evolution of mixed-use skyscrapers.

Consider, for instance, the 750,000 inhabitants of the visioned Shimizu Pyramid, a mega-structure standing over piers in Tokyo Bay, with miles of interconnected tunnels below.

While not entirely devoid of context and backdrop, Ascher’s vertical approach in her 2011 effort is more building-specific than citywide.  She glosses over history, regulation and interdisciplinary perspective in favor of design, construction and long-term site maintenance.

One compelling diagram illustrates the basics of floor-area ratio through a comparison of a 1.3 million square foot mixed-use skyscraper versus the same land use spread over a suburban setting.  I would have enjoyed more of such contrasts—about urban form as a whole—and the interrelationship of buildings, streets, blocks and transportation.

But, in fairness, this broader view is not Ascher’s premise, and my preference actually contrasts with Ascher’s core purpose of educating readers, through robust illustration, about the basic wonders and challenges of building tall.

While some other reviewers are in a quandary about the book’s intended audience, I have little doubt that Ascher has created a laudable, one-stop summary that goes beyond lists and photographs of tall buildings. and gives the rich grounding in vertical basics that all students of cities both need and deserve.

Book cover reproduction courtesy of Penguin Press. Building image composed by the author.

Last year, I asked what elements of today’s urban landscape occur in spite of urban land use policy and regulation, and form “shapes of avoidance”. I provided a historical example, and suggested modern counterparts. That was before Occupy Wall Street and its progeny.

Accordingly, Berg’s question recalled my thoughts from November, 2010, slightly amended from the original, below.

______

The form of urban settlements and appearance of constituent structures reflect underlying culture and regulation.

In times of change, buildings, landscapes and objects transform to show the impact of new or modified policies or regulations. And the resulting shapes of compliance—such as the patterns of height, bulk and density dictated by a new downtown zoning code—can potentially reinvent the urban landscape.

But the urban landscape can also be dramatically altered by “shapes of avoidance”.

Consider, in the context of everyday urbanism, those shapes and patterns dictated by focused avoidance of regulation.

Here, I am discussing not just spontaneous parklets and sidewalk tables of guerrilla urbanism” or “pop-up” cities, but widespread examples of urban forms that result when policy or regulation is creatively defied.

Call it the urban landscape’s manifestation of French-American microbiologist René Dubos‘ classic discourses on remarkable and unpredictable human adaptation to environmental change, Man Adapting and So Human an Animal.

A compelling example is the alteration of a southern Italian landscape in the 15th to 17th centuries premised on the avoidance of taxes or fees—the apparent explanation for the unique shape of trulli houses in Puglia, Italy—and the resulting appearance of the Itria Valley and the town of Alberobello.

As the story goes, local inhabitants built the conical houses—that don’t look like houses—without mortar. This method allowed easy destruction, so the Counts of Conversano could avoid property tax payments to the King of Naples on permanent structures (such as residences).

What are today’s trulli?

Are they merely a list of unenforced zoning violations (e.g. unpermitted home occupations, illegal accessory dwellings, unsanctioned tent cities, vehicles on lawns) or perpetual temporary uses?

Given the breadth of land use regulation today, could spontaneous, repetitive trulli-like “shapes of avoidance” define a sustainable urban landscape more interesting than planned examples?

Or are the most visible “shapes of avoidance” now limited to freedom of expression in the ballot box and on urban walls?

After all, some might argue that graffiti and the recent electoral landscape are the trulli of our times.

All images composed by the author.

This article was republished in similar form in the Fall 2011 issue of ARCADE, Architecture and Design in the Northwest.

Media attention to urban life continues, day by day, but to my mind, characteristic rankings, photographs and metrics often need greater historical context, and more robust, real-life punctuation.

While Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement parlay the daily urban tensions of democracy and authority, cities remain focal points of celebration, as demonstrated in Robert Kunzig’s latest city-as-solution retrospective and accompanying imagery in the December 2011 National Geographic.

Kunzig’s article is, in fact, closer to the holistic focus called for above. By using Ebenezer Howard’s “large and lingering impact” as a foil, Kunzig contrasts the zeal of economist Edward Glaeser, the perspectives of David Owen, as well as a mini-history of sprawl and South Korean density. His approach recalls journalist-turned-urban authority Grady Clay’s treatment of Howard’s Garden City ideals (and largely misplaced American implementation) in a famous 1959 Horizon Magazine article, “Metropolis Regained”.

Two years ago, while granting Clay its Athena Award, the Congress for the New Urbanism brought renewed attention to Clay’s article—as early documentation of back to the city principles.

Clay’s 1959 conclusion still holds:

All these ideas of the New Urbanists spring from their conviction that the city can be saved, but not by denying its nature. The city, they believe, generates innumerable devices for ameliorating the human lot, and we would do well to study these—even where at first glance they look disorderly and disreputable—before abandoning them. Cities have been around too long for our generation to desert them so precipitously. As that admirable humanist Leon Battista Alberti put it in his Deiciarchia, “The necessary things are those without which you cannot well pursue life. And as we see, man, from his emergence into this light to his last end, has always found it necessary to turn to others for help. But then cities were created for no other reason than for men to live together in comfort and contentment.”

Kudos to Kunzig for his artful use of Howard’s life-long quest for a livable urbanism; especially in the context of my memories of Clay’s writings.

But the Kunzig article invites more.

Like Clay’s observations in his later writings (e.g., the “Vantages” chapter in Close Up: How to Read the American City), in the last few months, I have pondered how best to further communicate urban preferences amid a changing landscape. As shown by both Kunzig and Clay, history can supplement two forms of documentation: straightforward photography with authentic, and ordinary personal experience.

To put this into practice, why not develop a simple test to measure a city (over and above complex rankings or metrics) that takes advantage of history, imagery and experience, including daily life? I offer, in short form, an emphasis on a creative reference, an icon and the hope to stay, as follows, and invite others to offer their own criteria.

The value of a creative reference. The founding story of a city is often an influential basis for prominence and evolution. The most famous founding stories derive from creation myths, such as that of Rome. Romulus and Remus, fathered by Mars, the God of War, abandoned at birth on the Tiber River by a threatened king, rescued by a wolf, and raised by shepherds—Romulus becomes ruler after prevailing in the “duel of the titans”.

In my measure, good lore is essential to a successful city.

The helpful role of a visible icon. Among the most photographed and touted elements of a city is a central place or object that can become a focal point for distinction and pride. Once religious or military in nature, modern cities display several exemplary civic monuments or places for ready reference of implied success.

Perhaps the most famous is the Eiffel Tower, which acts as a symbol of Paris in the opening photograph, above.

Most particularly, a compilation of completed statements about “why I hope to stay” can offer qualitative input on livability. For example: “I hope to keep living here because I feel like I can walk safely to where I need to go.”

These answers would not be uniform—some may champion transit, bicycles, parks and open space, good schools or night life—but the “why” question probes at the “comfort and contentment” referenced by Clay in “Metropolis Regained”, or Kunzig’s conclusion.

After saying goodbye to his interviewee, British planning academic Peter Hall, Kunzig explains:

With that he disappeared into the Underground for his ride home, leaving me on the crowded sidewalk with a great gift: a few hours to kill in London. Even Ebenezer Howard would have understood the feeling, at least as a young man. When he returned after a few years in the U.S.—he’d flopped as a homesteading farmer in Nebraska—he was jazzed by his native city. Just riding an omnibus, he later wrote, gave him a pleasantly visceral jolt: “A strange ecstatic feeling at such times often possessed me … The crowded streets—the signs of wealth and prosperity—the bustle—the very confusion and disorder appealed to me, and I was filled with delight.”

The key point: Kunzig, in National Geographic shows how as popular writing on urban topics matures, we move closer to meaningful issue statements about urban life. A narrative once the province of “specialists”, such as Clay, is now mainstream.

But with just a few more questions and answers of the sort proposed here, removed observation is more likely to result in practical understanding of urban solutions and success.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.

Whether centered on “reset” or “recession”, there is no shortage of provocative summaries about the game-changing new economy. As a legal practitioner who also writes about cities, I find the most value in comprehensive efforts gleaned from on-the-ground intelligence of urban trends—those parlayed by clients on a daily basis.

Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry on The Atlantic Cities. For the remainder, click here.

Photograph composed by the author.

The genius of the old ways, near Cortona in the 1950's

If universal questions about the dynamics of place need a stage to be answered, there is no better theater than Cortona, Italy, home to Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun, and a symbol of the romantic ambience of a simpler life.

There, American expatriate and film producer Sarah Marder left a long career in the banking industry to produce a pending documentary, The Genius of a Place, which tells both a personal and universal story based on 25 years of observing a commercial transformation from a tradition-based, agrarian economy to dependence on tourism and world renown.

The film’s title is no accident, echoing English poet Alexander Pope’s exhortation that we “consult the genius of the place in all”. The film crew followed suit, listening to evidence from the Etruscan past to today.

Despite the idyllic hill town setting (and interviews with well-known icons including Mayes herself, Sir Anthony Hopkins and Jeremy Irons), Marder insisted to me from Milan this week that while the movie was filmed in Cortona, the focus is far broader. “We see Cortona as a symbol for places all around the world facing similar challenges, undergoing rapid change, growth and construction.”

The film crew is pursuing what Marder terms “a balanced approach”, examining the benefits and drawbacks of this transformation. For instance, interviews depict a more dynamic town economy of new jobs and businesses, but also convey how the town center population has dwindled from a post-War high of roughly 7000 to less than 1500 today.

Marder at work in Cortona's main square

Similarly, townspeople explain how, as real estate prices have climbed, locals have sold older dwellings in favor of larger homes in outlying areas. The clear message is one of a changed commercial fabric, with stores now catering almost exclusively to touristic whims, not residents’ needs.

Footage also shows familiar urban challenges, Cortona style. Like many tourist centers, parking availability is often limited. In peak seasons, trash piles grow next to dumpsters. A well-digger explains the need for increased well depths based on substantially increased water demand.

From my perspective, in bridging common urban growth experiences worldwide, Marder’s endeavor is both remarkable and sincere. What happens to an authentic place forever altered by unexpected notoriety, such as Mayes’ arrival, books and films? How is tradition changed and culture compromised? How should growth be managed and a sustainable local economy preserved?

These are not casual questions about the impacts of tourism, but rather about best practices going forward, based on legacies potentially lost. As Marder explained during our several recent discussions:

As I saw things begin to change starting around 2000, I wanted to find a way to document some aspects of Cortona before they changed beyond recognition or repair. I especially wanted to document the way of life of the elderly, which resemble life from centuries ago, because I could see that it would soon be extinct. Ironically, I seemed to be among the few noticing. From the perspective of many, it was a non-issue—most people embraced their day-to-day concerns and were not worried that the town might change in unsatisfactory ways. For them, the town’s well-being followed from a legacy of the past 3000 years.

In fact, places like Cortona, with special topography, viewpoints and strategic advantage, have long driven human settlement. I wrote last year how historic hill town settings are instructive for more than romantic vacation ambience—they contain important lessons about successful human settlement.

These settings blend with natural surroundings; keep up a pedestrian identity, with limited vehicular access; emphasize aesthetic principles (views to and from); communally group institutions around public open space; carefully merge public pathways and private dwellings; offer efficient living spaces and allowance for density; as well as display innovative bases for water collection and storage and management of sewage and stormwater discharge.

An ancient borgo, or tiny village, in Cortona's surrounding countryside

With similar factors in mind, Etruscan choice of city location was typically a matter of utmost importance, carried out by specialized elders who knew how to apply the right criteria for a suitable site. Marder confirmed that as late as the 1950s, town residents were still using 2000-year old Etruscan wells scattered throughout the town.

Considering all that Marder and her team have achieved to date, the film could offer an enviable case study. In Genius’ merger of celebrity together with dozens of interviews with ordinary, yet thoughtful people, insightful views about placemaking in a global economy emerge. In the specific case of Cortona, Marder implicitly wonders whether tell-tale, accidental notoriety should be envied or avoided, mitigated or embraced.

Although Cortona’s recent growth has come mainly from tourism, in conversation, Marder focused instead on new development that has accompanied the town’s fame. She considers tourism just one of the many types of development a place can pursue, usually in a relatively unenlightened way:

All places understandably seek economic development. These same places then find themselves at some point wrestling with the side-effects of development that they didn’t ponder or manage particularly well. They didn’t foresee the future repercussions of their actions and have compromised their place through myopic behavior. That’s something sad and yet we, the creative team, believe it’s a universal story, something that is happening to communities all around the globe.

Until the film’s completion, the best summary of Marder’s message is through the film’s trailer, embedded below, as well as a variety of clips on YouTube.

The team behind Genius has the ambitious goal of a 2013 Sundance Film Festival début, an honor granted to just 1 in 50 films. Plans for 2012 include distilling 4000 minutes of footage into an about 90 minute film by September.

Meanwhile, people often ask the production team if the film is going to propose solutions to the questions presented. While neither a lawyer nor an urban planner, Marder said she is routinely pressed to generate “some policy, law or methodology”, something she said that she “is in no place to do”.

However, she has bigger plans that mirror the best of neighborhood outreach, visioning, and charrette. She hopes that the film will become a tool for promoting “local stewardship on a global level”, perhaps as a catalyst for touring workshops for engaging viewers on the unintended consequences of development in their own town or city.

“Is it Utopian to believe that people in communities could band together to safeguard their respective special place’s long-term interests?” she asked.

My answer honors the efforts of Marder and her film crew. As an alternative to traditional growth management approaches, legislative hearings and city council deliberations, perhaps we all should keep an eye on The Genius of a Place.

For more details on the film and production schedule, visit the film team’s website, here. Historic photo of Cortona-area oxen by Prof. Duilio Peruzzi. Photo of “Genius” on-set by Antonio Carloni. Photo of Cortona-area countryside composed by the author.

One of my favorite motivational scenes, that inspires city reinvention, is the one above.

The photo shows the first part of the Nice, France tramway—a city-center transit line which has helped change an automobile-oriented downtown. Experiencing this image in real-time, applying the full range of human senses, compelled my understanding of what is achievable amid the urban fabric of today.

Immersion in the real look and feel (and sometimes sound and smell) of a more compact and sustainable local experience can feed arguments for change, justify expenditures or tell how to cast a strategic election vote. Personal involvement is the most powerful and verifiable way to champion the city cause, over and above mere acceptance of empirical data, article prose and illustrations.

Unfortunately, when it comes to these far-away urban places, not all of us have real-time access to the inspirational modern projects served by transit, or the historic monuments, streets and squares that illustrate the potential of creative city life.

How best then to inspire others’ personal preferences for cities? How do we translate in real terms the popular arguments in favor of urban density and moderated use of the automobile?

I have written a fair amount on similar supplements to popular visions of how cities “should” be.  My past proposals include developing one’s own urban diary, considering the real challenges of “bringing home history from another place” and outlining the risks of developing “place-echoing” venues with a purpose only to provide––without more––decorative facades of more desirable places.

When advocating for clients or researching transit-oriented development topics, I have found that often the most daunting task is to cast an ideal new goal (such as re-engineering transit-based places next to single-family neighborhoods) as something of value, convenience and pleasure that will improve day-to-day life.

Here are three, perhaps non-traditional thoughts about how to bring messages home in a meaningful way.

By example. How to further the potential of a green tramway, even if it means giving up something accustomed, like street parking? Acceptance and excitement about the concept might occur through indirect, yet powerful experiences:  while sampling a local streetcar and understanding its convenience, suffering a long commute and its related frustration, or vicariously in a phone conversation with a friend who has just had a real-time experience in a far-away place where such transport exists.

Only when an abstract goal has such personal meaning can it be complemented through example, such as the photograph of Nice, France.  For some, such as property owners along a planned transit improvement, commitment may only be achieved after receipt of an ample compensation award by a transit agency to “sweeten” the deal.

By gestalt. Consider the value of a surprise event that recalls something well-known to you.  My own such experience was a sudden brush with a famous painting early one morning, where a similar, modern view resulted in a new perspective.

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting (from 1942) has long symbolized the loneliness and isolation of urban life.

That Hopper painting, much critiqued and recreated for almost 70 years, appeared anew to me in a university city (Eugene, Oregon), in early morning darkness.

But, ironically, inside the new “Nighthawks” setting was an upbeat, small city crowd with resilience and interaction—the opposite of Hopper’s interpretation of urban life—an environment which suggested the positive elements of human interaction as the baseline for all of our urban potential.

By local reinvention. A logical place for firsthand observation is close to home, where local action can supplement big ideas through demonstrable implementation, such as a reclaimed natural system, a dedicated restoration of a creek in urban woods.

One such “scaled” lesson learned comes from a historic urban park network, partially restored by neighbors, working with the Seattle Park Department. Seattle’s Madrona Woods story, accessible here, shows us how and why.

Note the city woods, then (1909), and now (2011):

And see the new pedestrian bridge, and restored Lake Washington shore:

While photographs, artwork, numbers and the written word are accessible to most, in my view, limited access to real-time experience of place is a challenge to urbanist sermons and rankings.  I find that successful advocacy and implementation is more about facilitating real and personal commitment in others than in proselytizing about the abstract, and for that, we need more accessible experiences.

In the end, urging people to witness and experience their own examples, gestalt and local reinvention may become the most successful advocacy of all.

Image of Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper via Wikipedia, fair use. 1909 postcard of Madrona Park courtesy of City of Seattle. All other images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.

The city gate of old: form follows function

In a time of urbanization, “arrival cities” and metropolitan regions with multiple urban centers, should a city provide an entry differentiating itself from its barrios, suburbs and exurbs?

Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry on Sustainable Cities Collective. For the remainder, click here.

Just imagine an efficient scene of shuttle transit from a large parking area to your destination, a compact service district. At the end of the shuttle, medical services, a bank, food, drink, entertainment and public restrooms greet your arrival. The spirit of human activity and community are everywhere.

We know these qualities as the ideal characteristics of urban density, of transit-oriented development and of successful, traditional or new “infill” neighborhoods. We also know these qualities as reflective of simple and basic underlying human needs.

And that is exactly the point, as the description above is not of a city, but of the staging and administration area for the obstacle course known as Hell Run, “the most kick-ass mud run on earth”.

Participation in a temporary gathering place, whether it is the staging area for Hell Run, Burning Man or a county fair, remind us of the fundamentals of human settlement, and the framework elements we are trying to recapture in rethinking cities today.

In fact, several authors have addressed the more purposeful creativity of Burning Man, and have debated the urbanistic standing of temporary or nomadic encampments, or, as Nate Berg has noted, city-like places.

I am particularly interested in core services that appear in such places, whether they last for one day or several, and what their inadvertent presentation and implementation tell us about human nature and first principles of association in urban areas. As Aron Chang recently wrote in adapting the work of Ellen Dunham-Jones, Christopher Leinberger and others, embracing traditional human qualities and day-to-day life patterns is essential if historically sprawl-based suburbs are to be successfully reinvented.

For me, the look and feel of the Hell Run staging area was actually a gestalt reminder of more profound, simplifying experiences in Tanzania earlier this year.

There, witnessing daily life was a “back to basics” reorientation which confirmed the underpinnings of cities as conceptualized by the Richard Florida model: places to creatively reinvent human capital from the ground up, taking people’s common and creative potential to higher levels.

I am not arguing event planning as a replacement for urban planning. Rather, I am using visual examples to agree with those who have acknowledged the human aspect of urbanism over top-down prescription or unsustainable patterns of growth.

As illustrated, temporary and less developed places can look eerily similar in the way fundamental human services are congregated and presented to the public, and I would venture that these are the true building blocks of cities everywhere.

It is beyond these building blocks—how our cities and those of the developing world continue to grow, and how growth is administered—where the real challenges continue.

Last March, in a baseline examination of the fundamentals of housing and the wheeled vehicle, I focused on a nagging question brought home from Tanzania and which recurred at the Hell Run staging area: Do we sometimes regulate away the urban vitality of our cities by attempting complex, prescriptive fixes — aimed at modeling or reclaiming what used to evolve naturally — and ironically squelch the first principles of human shelter and transportation suggested above?

Inherited forms of shelter and age-old methods of transportation are to residential zoning and infrastructure planning what oral histories are to Gutenberg — the backdrop of rich tradition for codification and institutional creation. If safety and well-being are maintained, such institutionalization may be laudable for preserving practices or legends otherwise lost with time. However, if the result is lost functionality, needless complexity, discrimination or prohibitive expense, the institution may need reexamination.

For instance, what if a zoning code is no longer cohesive, or impedes rather than accomplishes societal goals?

What if the automobile is overused, at increasing expense, when bicycle, cart, or other transportation would do, with the value added of health and exercise?

Sometimes this contrast of fundamentals to complexity, or of a different place and tradition, can refocus priorities, and warp the senses.

In the words of the postwar Italian writer and Invisible Cities author, Italo Calvino:

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.

Consider Tanzanian roadside stands and the traditional forms of transportation used when a car is either unavailable, inaccessible or inappropriate. Commerce and people can move, without regulation. Wheels and the human body go places in ways we have forgotten. Innovative, human-propelled transport, often with goods attached, knows no bounds.

While not literally Calvino’s cities, images from the developing world, coupled with temporary places such as the Hell Run staging area, “exchange their form”. Together, their initial modesty suggests that through the complex evolution from initially well-meaning institutionalization, we risk losing what is most human about places we live.

So, in building urban community, it remains imperative to reassess—with simplicity in mind—and to always remember first principles, such as shelter and the wheel.

All images composed by the author near Karatu, Tanzania and Carnation, Washington. Click on each image for more detail.

Safety, proximity and interaction: the stuff of poetry, metrics or both?

If “cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” as the English poet Rupert Brooke suggests, then how many of us should fear for our safety in the urban darkness? Is a nighttime city better measured by the numbers, rather than by such human perception and poetry?

In my view, first noted here. Brooke’s poetry is a worthy start. His feline analogy creates the framework for five important qualities of 24-hour, magnetic places. The first, safety, spurs four more—mobility, proximity, commerce and interaction.

An ideal night street dining scene would increase city rank

We know the positives from these qualities: legendary, all-night coding jags in the technology sector, vibrant nightlife and night markets, to name a few. All can enable more robust evening public transit service and police presence through a credible political voice lobbying for still more.

While metrics may not be necessary to frame the look and feel of a successful city at night, more formal measures might further structure inspirational images of vibrance over emptiness.

Perhaps it is time for a moniker—-a “lumens score” or “urban illumination index”—to add to the indicators of a 24-hour city, something characteristic of the creative metropolitan meccas called for by the vanguard of today’s urbanist advocates.

I can see the maps, graphs and charts, not to mention the list: “Top Ten Cities to Achieve Brilliance Without Light”.

The relationship between darkness and urbanism has been studied several times in interdisciplinary fashion, and at least one MIT course has been devoted to the “interaction design” of the associated “world of night”. However, my sense is that these efforts remain far more at the cutting edge than they should.

Low interactivity, an incomplete street: a low "lumens score"

In discussion of public safety issues concerning urban areas, law enforcement, design and planning often remain in their respective silos, devoid of integration.

Ongoing neighborhood policing and social service initiatives should be more outrightly integrated with the renewed focus on environmental and urban design criteria for safe streetscapes.

Concepts of “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design” (CPTED)—frequently international in nature—have been present for decades and were implied in Jane Jacobs’ work.

CPTED principles on display in Melbourne

A recent visit to Melbourne, Australia, showed certain CPTED principles along neighborhood streetcar lines, including ample (glare-protective) night-lighting, territorial sensitivities to illuminated, sidewalk-oriented window areas, enhancement of the role of passing vehicles, transparent protection from weather at building entries, and low bushes and/or lower picket-type fencing along the street to limit access while allowing for entry visibility.

Similar safety-enhancement approaches to safety of female transit users have received wide attention. Many cities and civic associations (such as the Downtown Seattle Association) have also advocated for integration of CPTED principles.

Increased advocacy efforts for funding of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure will accelerate policy and regulation encouraging such principles for safety. This should lead to further discussion opportunities for “complete streets,” which include the dimension of lighting to facilitate wider, multimodal use over a longer percentage of the day.

From the street, hidden possibilities intrigue the imagination amid open and closed businesses, shadows and light.

When evening light and crowds merge to create a sense of safety, where walking and transit define mobility and proximity, if commerce goes on without the sun, then human interaction with the built environment is a demonstrated success.

If we need to energize this after-dark integration by goal setting, for a “lumens score” of 10 out of 10, time is of the essence.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.

Real neighborhood experiences can provide a meaningful gloss on current discussions about how to make cities better and increase shared places for all.

On Saturday night, in response to an email, I went to the movies by walking 100 feet from my home. Admission was free. And it was not in the comfort of an isolated home or downtown space, but among some 20 neighbors in an everyday place, hidden and in plain sight: Monica and Michael’s alley entry, against Anne and Jerry’s retaining wall.

Our last “alley movie night” of the summer was an important reminder that a city neighborhood can experience community without really trying—an “urbanism without effort” that needs no thought leadership nor sound bytes—and is as natural as European street life in places we sometimes wish we were.

We can try awfully hard—sometimes too hard, in my opinion—to extol the virtues of the city by proselytizing and debating ideas and opportunities. In particular, the potential for American urban alleys remains in the spotlight. This attention, often aspirational, is well-deserved given the raw alley palette for remade narrow streets in the organic European tradition, pedestrian in scale, narrow, interesting and a natural focus for greening street life and new small businesses.

Recently, additional essays (e.g., Alyse Nelson writing in Sightline last week), have recalled alleys’ placemaking role within the urbanist toolbox. Specific, grant-funded work by Seattle’s Daniel Toole has emphasized the now iconic, reclaimed laneway precedent of Melbourne and beyond.

The challenges, of course, are how to pay for reclaiming and maintaining these alleys. And, as with many instances of infrastructure improvement, we must determine where and how the private sector can make a difference in implementing improvements and maintenance too costly for today’s municipal public transportation and utility agencies.

After all, it’s not just about clearing away the dumpsters. As I’ve related before in contributions to the urbanist dialogue (in myurbanist and on Seattle’s KUOW radio), public rights of way, stormwater system maintenance, pavement resurfacing and other forms of street improvement may be required in order to materially reinvent desired space.

Yet, in the meantime, there are ready and simple victories in residential alleys less known or described, where neighborhood is there for the taking.

Admittedly, not all of us have traditional alleys at our back doors (which we often treat as main entries), but those of us who do can readily avail ourselves of the once and future urbanism of alley reinvention. Those of us who don’t might find a driveway and garage to suffice for now.

Email, potluck food and drink, equipment setup, and a bedsheet-as-movie screen yield public space for community, not because of doctrine or dogma, but because it is as natural as the place next door.

The best urbanism is that which is already there to be nurtured, a practice that I highly recommend.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.

In the provinces of southeastern Italy, the landscape is changing, as a new world of alternative energy infrastructure blends insular hill towns, turbines and solar panels across traditional farmland. Yet, on the same horizons other, age-old reflections of local sustainable practices echo time-honored human traditions, as lessons for urban reinvention in a networked world.

We need to discuss these lessons more often.

For two August weeks observing the cities, towns and villages of Basilicata, Molise and Puglia, I pondered how these reflections of people and place could inform American aspirations—-often rhetorical—for compact urban centers which incubate ideas and offer solutions.

On the surface, daily urban life was readily presentable as resilient urban settings, often rendered among strolling, night crowds—a public realm reflective of climate and tradition. Amid commerce and curiosity, along streets, beside buildings and as a component of cross-town strolls, American urban density advocates can easily find justification in the residual Europe they want to see: venerable town centers, captivating facial expressions, the simplicity of child’s play in streets and squares, complemented by nearby mealtime banter, often without pattern or prescription.

Yet, behind today’s compelling imagery, there is the back story of history responsible for today, including lessons from fantastical places ripe for ready reference by urbanists and futurists who drive today’s smart cities conversation.

An example is Matera, in Basilicata, currently a city of 60,000, with a unique legacy that frames a remarkable setting of almost 10,000 years of continuous human occupation. There, the history of urban ecology, from sustainability to squalor, inspired UNESCO to designate a World Heritage Site, while its old Jerusalem-like aura captured several movie directors, including Mel Gibson, who used Matera to film The Passion of the Christ.

Matera’s legacy is a place of precedent for the sustainable city of the sort I wrote about last month in myurbanist, referencing the recent summary of sustainable city characteristics by Harvard Professor Joan Busquets. in Busquets’ concise framework, the most sustainable cities integrate natural geography and systems (such as water) into the urban fabric, provide a comfortable city center and have long-lasting, flexible designs.

According to Busquets, the sustainable city is also the historical city, and in this context, Matera readily provides examples of both sustainable urban practices reusable today, as well as the consequences of failure of long-term, sustainable systems. One lesson in particular shines through: a sustainable model must be resilient in the face of population expansion, and new economies and politics in order to stand the test of time.

UNESCO has repeatedly used Matera as an educational case study. An associated Baltic Sea Project educational guide for “observing and innovating urban ecology” (portions of which are summarized here), laments how Matera’s sustainability depended on its isolation, was undone by the trade and commerce of a capitalist world, and champions its local examples as inspiration.

Ironically, Matera’s focal point, the sassi (literally “stones”) cliff dwellings, are not readily apparent on entry to town today. They are hidden, essentially as artifacts, in two urban valleys adjacent to an ancient, cave-hewn river bed below the modern city. Yet in their time, the sassi were an exemplar of sustainable practices and textbook marriage of habitation, infrastructure and ecosystem.

The sassi of Matera included dwellings which successfully adapted to both a cool, moist winter climate and hot and dry summers. Their story is one of systems integration and efficient infrastructure—the use of natural (later extended) cliff dwelling caves for food storage, housing and urban social and commercial functions. Cisterns, built into the rock underneath such dwellings, collected channeled rainwater, and non-polluted, fresh water was successfully preserved in winter for year-round use.

As a largely self-sufficient settlement of 10,000-20,000 inhabitants into and beyond the Middle Ages, Matera grew its own food supply—nearby gardens were provided by the roof of the next cliff dwelling below. Waste, wastewater and manure were recycled. Building material was comprised of the local chalk-like sandstone (tuffa), and building stone was perpetually recreated from inner extension of the caves into the cliffs. In this sustainable world, there was little need for significant means of transportation other than to and from nearby agricultural lands, and the urban form remained largely unchanged until the eighteenth century.

Then, in a century of widespread trade revival, Matera became less isolated and the sustainable systems management of habitation, food, water and waste broke down. New residents from elsewhere brought overpopulation of the sassi. The water collection system was broken and fouled by the use cisterns as dwellings for less privileged inhabitants. As water use increased, the capacity to safely conserve it was lost. Ultimately, animals lived in close quarters with humans, and waste management systems lost integrity.

Ultimately, through the advocacy of Carlo Levi’s writing in the 1950′s, Matera’s poor and crowded living conditions, low life expectancy, high infant mortality rates and disease infestation became well known. Governmental intervention forced abandonment of the sassi until the 1990s, and the relocation of over 15,000 people. Architect Pietro Laureano—known for expertise in the urban ecology of the sassi—championed the sassi’s legacy of sustainability and adaptation to the local environment, and by 1996, Matera received its UNESCO World Heritage Site designation.

As the Baltic Sea Project study concludes, in championing the local sustainability solutions of Matera, even in today’s more complex world:

The sustainable town of Matera from the past showed a balanced ecology based on low consumption of local resources and recycling. Almost no materials or food came from abroad, trade and transport was extremely limited to the surrounding agricultural land and based on land transport done by animals or people. This transport constituted at the same time the communication lines. Muscular power and wood for fire, oil for light were the scarce energy sources used. The town stayed literally unchanged and independent of external supply through hundreds of years, with very little growth in population.

Its decline as sustainable habitation came… because of rapid immigration in a period (18th Century) of growing World trade.

During the last two centuries, neither the basic population nor the political powerful landowners, traders or governors wanted the sustainability and independency continued. They wanted to profit from the market.
…

In many countries, planners and entrepreneurs have developed local urban technology, mostly green housing, zero energy buildings, electric transport systems, but also urban ecology projects for a full-scale towns or suburbs, though still local solutions.
…

Nevertheless local solutions have shown a variety of options, and the importance of using local ideas, resources and materials is inevitable. It is simply one of the fundamental components of urban ecology, as well as it is a strategy “to break through the barriers” for unsustainable urban development.

Can the principles of Matera be successfully reintegrated in a more complex world where regional, national and world markets impact local autonomy like never before? We seem to talk like they can, with carbon-neutrality goals and tool-based approaches to transportation, water, waste, power and communication systems, including energy districts, rainwater collection, urban agriculture, bioswales, innovative architectural approaches, to name but a few.

In my view we are trying to recreate the golden age of Matera on a wide, sometimes indiscriminate scale, couched in language of inspiration, rather than precedent. Yet, the sustainable cities we seek should incorporate qualities we can learn from Matera and other documented human traditions.

Don’t get me wrong. The city of the future should be dynamic and abound with the wonders of new ideas and technology aptly catalogued in this month’s special issue of Scientific American. But I suspect that its success will also be readily ascertainable from sustainable examples of the past.

All images composed by the author in or adjacent to the sassi of Matera, Italy. Click on each image for more detail.

Urban integration with geography

Those of us who write about cities should be students of history and experience, and with some humility listen to scholars and the legacy of urban development from around the world. In that sense, a recent summary of sustainable city characteristics by Harvard Professor Joan Busquets provides considerable food for thought and exploration.

According to Busquets, the most sustainable cities integrate natural geography and systems (such as water) into the urban fabric, provide a comfortable city center and have long-lasting, flexible designs. His formula for a merger of geography, comfort and flexibility embraces many issues in today’s urban dialogue, such as increasing opportunities to walk and use transit, to live closer to work and to consequently increase density and the efficient use of urban space.

The comfortable city center

I take from Busquets that a sustainable city also tactfully manages the transition from rural to urban, from country to city. Today’s tools seek to enhance this symbiotic town and country relationship, from the latest regional planning efforts (as recently acknowledged by Kaid Benfield) to innovative organizations such as the Cascade Land Conservancy, which has pioneered incentives for rural conservation in return for more concentrated urban development in Washington State.

Busquets describes the sustainable city as the historical city, which to me, cries for evidence—a physical realm of the sort championed in the late Edmund Bacon’s 1967 classic, Design of Cities, looking to traditional patterned interplay between people and place than modern regulatory tools.

The flexible city on the road to the square

How did this physical transition from country to city happen in history? How was the change in surroundings designed—or not—as one approached the city center? How did streets and alleys play magical roles in guiding travelers to anticipate arrival at focal points of commerce, government and public squares? What of angles and curves, color and light, all modified by architectural features, elevations and building materials? In times of infrastructure shortfall—and absent the ability to redevelop major swaths of land—this element of implementing Busquets’ formulation of geography, comfort and flexibility risks jeopardy, but we should not lose sight of the inquiry and potential lessons learned.

Last week, when discussing “sustainable storefronts“, I suggested that highly evolved cities successfully implement universal urban characteristics from elsewhere in a local context. Other related building blocks covered earlier include third places, corners and fusion businesses.

Next week, while abroad, I’ll be looking hard at how such building blocks can fit together again in places that largely play well with their surrounding settings—in support of the successful integration of natural geography, comfort and flexibility along the way.

All images composed by the author in Puglia, Italy, where he will return next week.

Vital storefronts are an indicator of urban success, while empty businesses are akin to the ruins of Pompeii.

Even when storefronts go empty, some cities find ways to simulate that all is well. False facades, community art and the look and feel of a vibrant business district often substitute for empty spaces through glass.

That’s all well and good in cities. Elsewhere, it’s a luxury left behind.

In a skeleton of a small Idaho downtown last weekend, I explored the remnants of what we now seek in bigger places: compact, mixed-use blocks with character—the neighborhood grocery and the watering spot next door. Several buildings were proudly engraved “1914″ and I concluded that if airlifted to my neighborhood in 2011, they would fit in just fine.

Passersby in a pickup truck—a father and son—saw me amid the storefronts, and stopped and watched me for a moment. “Are you from around here?” asked the father. “Do you know if there is a store in town?” 

I could have said no, but instead I wanted to hint at the irony of their search for the vanished vitality of where we were. “Look around,” I said.  ”You’ll find that there used to be more than one.”

The storefront may now be scarcer in the hinterlands, but it has found new life as one of the building blocks of the reinvented, more flexibly-zoned city—a primary contributor to complete streets, social interaction, walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented central places. The passion for such “first floor retail” has been declared and codified in planning goals and land use regulations alike.

Rockville, Maryland’s town center storefront design guidelines are typical of such emphasis, and further encourage creativity in how storefronts present to the street:

Rockville’s “great urban place” sets the stage upon which the storefronts will be
layered. Because of the investment in quality for all aspects of Rockville Town Center, storefront guidelines encourage creative and well-designed individual expressions of tenant identity. Strong urban storefronts are essential in the creation of an attractive and exciting, dining, shopping, and leisure environment.

Highly evolved cities rise above the status quo by seamlessly implementing a universal urban characteristic in a local context, seizing opportunities that have worked before to create the magnetism of success.

However, the romance of an idea can be offset by the reality of the Great Recession—and risks recreating the unsustainable place where passersby ask pedestrians if there is a store in the neighborhood. Recognizing such risks, in Seattle, a regulatory reform roundtable has recommended that certain street level retail requirements be relaxed, to avoid more empty spaces in challenging times.

Storefronts have always made the city, and as economic challenges continue, more flexibility to create dynamic and interesting street uses should remain at the forefront of city-making—mindful of what businesses need to survive.

All images composed by the author.