From the 23rd floor of Touchstone’s West 8th building in Seattle, a palette for placemaking frames the northerly view towards Elliott Bay. The 12 acre assemblage of parking lots and low rise uses is owned by the Clise family, who attempted to market the properties en masse in 2007 to no avail. The original, poster-like rendering below invites thoughts of the redevelopment potential which could be realized with the effective vision and management of an innovative purchaser.
The recalibration of urbandwidth in a suburban, outdoor mall:
Writing and conversing about the urban experience has made one thing clear. Short of the word “urbanism” and its modified variants, there is no one English word which holistically captures the qualities of livable cites or the associated metrics that many commentators tout and exemplify.
Portland’s Jason King supports this point in his wonderful article,”[Fill in the Blank] Urbanism,” which I noted in March. King’s article profiled the range of paired terms which modify the basic urbanism premise–and asked readers to name a favorite.
Others have described the inadequacy of commonly used catchwords. Writing in the Washington Post, on May 8, architect Roger Lewis called for terms far more descriptive than “transit-oriented development” (TOD) to describe the qualities of walkable cities, calling for “multimodal TOD’s”.
Similarly, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab Director, Liz Dunn, working with Walk Score’s Matt Lerner, have advocated for a Jane Jacobs-based comprehensive metric, the Jane Score, to more completely measure urban diversity and “granularity” and supplement the increasingly recognized Walk Score tool.
With such ever-expanding and thoughtful efforts to diversify the measures applicable to a renewed, compact, walkable, and multimodal urban fabric, it would help to have one word to describe the phenomenon.
I suggest that we are talking about recalibrating urbandwidth around the world.
(This article appears in slightly different form in seattlepi.com on July 21, here. Thanks also to Planetizen for incorporating the original form of this article under the headline “For Lack of a Better Term,” here.)
Since our six month recap of myurbanist sightings in late April, further recent sightings merit additional thanks.
In particular, thanks to Planetizen for carrying the first Jerusalem urban sustainability piece of our Israel series, to Kaid Benfield for multiple kind references to our backyard cottage articles and initial postcard piece in his NDRC Switchboard blog and reprints in The Huffington Post and the Daily Kos. (See also Kaid’s great new blog post, “Musings on vacation sites, consumption, and resilient communities”, here).
Thanks again to Knute Berger for reference to myurbanist in his May, 2010 Seattle Magazine column.
And a final, special thanks to CH2MHill’s ever-improving Green Growth Cascadia blog (especially Jeanne Acutanza and Wesley Zhao) for reference to our Nord Alley piece and the current “Green Growth Profile” of myurbanist and background pontificator, as embedded below. Seattle’s Great City also provided a nice summary of the profile and the context for myurbanist, here.