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.
Upon reflection, I realized one major reason for these questions and observations: an unexpected, motivational discovery in a Seattle used bookstore one year ago. This discovery led to spare-time research, interviews and the the first-hand opportunity to spend time with some remarkable photographs and fascinating stories.
Here, revised below, for new readers and old, is the stirring work of Burton Holmes, a continued and motivating force in my own work, and by inference, a catalyst for us all.
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“100 years from now I wonder if those in the future who view these images will appreciate the value of … pictures as a means of recording life as is lived in this century… photography is in the truest sense biography –is it not the writing of life in a truly universal language?”
-Burton Holmes, Seoul, Korea, 1899
The Great Recession, climate change and the quest for carbon neutrality have reoriented how we look at cities, the distance between home and work, and the role of the automobile.
A simultaneous, street-based nostalgia targets simpler times, a more human scale and an elusive world of accessible neighborhoods often lost in the memories of previous generations.
Consider imagery which restores such lost urban memories for those who did not witness modern urban history, and recreates what political writer Alexander Cockburn has termed “the lost valleys of the imagination”.
Such “lost valleys” often grace nearby bookstores and online forays, but quality varies, and frustrates our romantic search to turn back time.
Of all available resources, amid blogs and information byways, no visual record is more compelling than the archived work of seldom remembered, but innovative documentary pioneers, who left behind breathtaking records of camera artistry: pictures revealing moments when people hardly understood the camera as it recorded the profound change which surrounded them.
One such pioneer, Burton Holmes, preserved imagery in unparalleled human scale, first with black and white, glass negatives, often hand-colored with fine, single hair ermine brushes and through parallel use of motion pictures from the time of their invention.
He showed all that a city can be—while also depicting the changing form and appearance of infrastructure, public spaces and the impact of this change on urban residents.
Travelogues, the Greatest Traveler of His Time, Ed. Genoa Caldwell
His legendary work, which entertained the captive opera-goers in front rows and the general admission crowds in the rear, is well-chronicled in the work of Genoa Caldwell (The Man Who Traveled the World and Travelogues: The Greatest Traveler of His Time, recently republished as Early Travel Photography), as well as by other devotees, and can be readily reviewed in print and online (including the most resource-intensive compilation at burtonholmes.org).
Holmes was not an intentional urban historian. He became a famous stage presenter, who, from the late nineteenth century until the 1950’s, inherited a showman’s tradition from previous travel lecturers and became synonymous with the new word, “travelogue,” which he favored to stimulate vicarious interest in his art. He brought the first motion picture cameras to the Far East, recorded Tolstoy and the coronation of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and otherwise roamed the world–often to places of danger where a camera had never been– and brought home both organic, natural portraits of life abroad and entertaining still and cinematic visions to halls across America.
However, over and above Holmes’ published travelogue narratives, a particularly intentional urban documentary purpose flows from his photos, as depicted above and below. Photo-archivist and biographer Caldwell has shared hints of this perhaps subconscious resolve in quotations she has compiled in the over 30 years she has devoted to her research. An example of one reference she has found that holistically describes urban ambiance addresses Berlin in 1907.
Holmes noted Berlin as a city of contrasts, where the traveler feels the unseen presence of something fine and beautiful, and it is cleanliness, he said, that pleads most eloquently for Berlin. There, he described how the art of municipal housekeeping is practiced in perfection: “Berlin is the best-kept great city in the world–there are no backyards in Berlin, [and] balconies filled with flowers ornament the buildings, [while] outdoor cafes give impressions of cheerful sociability, and the traveler is confirmed in his impression that Berlin is a city beautiful.”
Holmes’ cameras captured far more than the order he saw in Berlin; he chronicled the impact of new forms of transportation as they were introduced to classical environments, and the resulting evolution of streets and ways of life.
BeIow is a sampling of the collection maintained by Burton Holmes Historical Collection (BHHC), reprinted with special permission and under copyright of BHHC. Caldwell has archived 1700 of an assemblage which once numbered 30,000 photos, the rest lost to the poor condition of time. A range of movie footage, from 200 film cans rediscovered in 2003, now resides at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.
a mode we have lost?
A captivating horse and buggy amid Melbourne’s clouds shows a morning routine now lost in Western culture today. Holmes was fascinated by the expanse of the Australian continent and the impact of colonization on native people and place.
A grand Austrian urban stroll provides a model for emulation. Holmes regaled in the “superb edifice” of Vienna’s Grand Opera House, while his camera prioritized the pedestrian view.
Traffic congestion took different forms, often without protection from the elements. Holmes’ photographs were rich with street scenes in world cities. Consider the different social nature of traffic interactions without doors or windows and the different sounds that graced the street.
Early in the last century, Holmes toured Denmark by car. Here, a rare car-sighting south of Copenhagen in 1902 yields to a predominant auto culture on Seattle’s Marion Street by 1934.
Note the human interaction in a public place as captured by Holmes in Italy and France, countries he repeatedly visited in times of war and peace. Today’s increasing attention to sidewalk cafes and public gathering spaces attempts to achieve the ambiance of the photographs below.
Jaffa Gate, in the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, shows the evolution from animal to motorized transport at the sunset of the Ottoman Empire. The Jerusalem chronicled by Holmes is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s narrative in Innocents Abroad.
The gold rush town of Dawson City, Yukon Territory was assembled in weeks with all the vitality of an urban place. Holmes’ many photographs there documented a new town built on speculation with a surprising sense of permanence, amenity, and not least of all, sidewalks.
Holmes’ work offers a central place to rediscover the look and feel of Cockburn’s “lost valleys of the imagination” and provides models to facilitate the regeneration of a classic model of urban life–a full experience shaped not just by where one could drive in a car, but by where one could walk or ride by animal–or access by public transportation. His photographs provide gloss on features to include in new development and the planning of today’s complete streets.
The implications from the photographs are more than academic, as inferred principles of practice for regulation and design emerge. The architect can derive the relation of building and street. The traffic engineer can see inspiration for lanes, surfacing and signage. The lawyer and planner can react to setbacks, and ways to encourage pedestrian spaces while assuring light, air, acceptable noise levels and governance of private use of public spaces.
Perhaps most of all, the child in all of us is transported by time-travel to a fantasy world better than the Wizard of Oz, because the world in the photographs was real and foundational. In the end, the “film as biography” foretold by Holmes in 1899 draws us in, and challenges us to reclaim and relive the best of the city. It is a biography we should read as precedent, both for inspiration and for lessons learned from the consequences of change.
Republished in Crosscut on September 18, 2010 in edited form, here. Thanks also to Kaid Benfield for republication in his “Village Green” column in The Huffington Post on September 8, 2010, and his Natural Resources Defense Council Blog on September 9, 2010 .
The corner is the central place of urban life. More so than public squares—which require a conscious set-aside of assembled space—corners naturally result from crossroads, the elemental feature of travel between places.
Ancient, grid-based Roman military towns, or castra, were planned around crossroads and their corners. The “100 percent corner” is historic shorthand for flagship downtown locations. Decision-making among retailers and residents debate the pros and cons of multi-street exposure to this day.
The corner has been inspiration to authors and poets:
Albert Camus noted the corner as among a city’s most inventive places: “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door”.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s poetry provided fantastical inspiration: “Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate”.
As illustrated by the exploratory images provided here, corners are by nature interdisciplinary, regardless of cultural surrounding.
At crossroads, whether paved and straight or dirt and ill-defined, destinations meet wheeled and other forms of transport, while natural systems meet reconstructed space. As modes of transportation coalesce, people watch and wait. Often, drainage, power and other utilities focus at such central points, above and below ground. Corners are places of safety and intimidation, homogeneity and contrast.
Given these ironies of focus and ambiguity, corners become opportunities to unify design and land uses. Associated regulatory approaches attempt defensible mixtures of public and private uses at more than the scale of single buildings.
Increasingly popular examples include small commercial entities in traditionally residential zones, residential units located on floors above retail, private uses of otherwise public rights of way and greater human presence in the traditional vehicular domain.
Beyond the wry observation of Camus and the allegory of Tolkien, urban corners may represent the best, most visible and pragmatic opportunity to reorient our cities, and become nothing short of the baseline—the building blocks—for reinvention of city neighborhoods in the new millennium.
All images composed by the author. Click on each image for a larger view.
A prevalent theme in contemporary urbanist articles and blog posts addresses the enhanced experience of places in cities—whether while walking, biking, or using public transportation. Kasey Klimes’ recent, personal reflections on bicycles as keys to better cities is no exception, and centers on and celebrates this very key point of “experiential understanding.”
The premise is simple: cities are hubs of human interaction, and the urban experience can be enhanced by authentic participation in the dynamics of a place and transitions to nearby venues, including other neighborhoods, or, in certain instances, nearby towns.
With the advent of the internet, this story is told with more than just words.
Simultaneously, the growing art of urban exploration—infiltrating and documenting cities in new, often controversial ways—offers more “experiential understanding.” However, as recently voiced with some skepticism by Bradley Garrett in Domus, citizen fascination and compilation of urban decay or hidden infrastructure should not be confused with more studied academic documentary efforts.
Rather than simply receive and review such messages (or debate their validity), why not document your own choice of how to live? Why not create your own urban diary?
A pen, keyboard or camera can lead to interaction with surroundings, and avoidance of—no pun intended—a one way street.
Here are five suggestions for framing your surroundings:
On your next walk from where you live to a destination of choice, summarize the experience in one paragraph.
Take five photos of your favorite neighborhood locations.
Think about somewhere you wish was closer to where you live. Pick an ideal location, and write about, or photograph how you would travel from here to there.
Videotape a walk, bike ride or roadside activity along a street.
Using burst or continuous mode on a camera, photograph street life that you observe from a passenger window.
Do these suggestions sound like forced immersion, or an invasion into the public spaces around you?
Or, rather than merely watching someone else’s video, might you further develop and understand your relationship to place, as well as other similar interactions which you observe?
Personal documentation of the journey from place to space—crossing and intersecting the public and private realms—may be the best way to understand where we live, the choices we make and those that are made for us.
Through such urban diaries, each of us can learn more about cities as they are and could be.
