A new trend features photographers’ translations of Google Street View scenes—accompanied by remarkable creative messaging—often topical to urban issues.
One such effort, Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, focuses on challenged American cities such as Camden and Detroit, and displays a world remarkably opposite the technology used to depict his presented scenes. Click here to see his groundbreaking work.
Similarly, words are not always necessary to describe how public rights of way are used around the world, and travel is not a prerequisite of viewing the interaction of foot, wheel and pavement.
Here, without more words, are portrayals of a Sunday morning visit to Japan, Mexico, Brazil and Finland, with both familiar and novel interactions in plain view.
Credit the wonders of Google for these street-oriented images, and Mr. Rickard for inspiring the myurbanist use of camera and software to enhance such virtual visits from afar.
Think about human journeys in the city. Every trip begins on foot, usually in a private place. In order to reach the next place, paths cross and the way we travel diversifies. The urban experience is the system of mutually crossed paths. Amid the paths is the public realm, the historic locus of regulation addressing appropriate conduct, health, safety and land use.
The urban experience is also the best spectator sport we have, free of charge.
The opportunity to draw back and observe the sport of “getting there, going there and almost there” yields memorable snapshots of daily life, some of which are displayed below from around the world.
Such snapshots of the interaction of people and places illustrate far more than our best spectator sport. They prescribe salient points of public-private interface and frame the quality of the urban experience—and most importantly—define questions of considerable value to today’s urban dialogue.
In particular, these observations frame an audit for us all about today’s urban quality of life and the success of our urban agenda.
What is the role of signage in governing human conduct?
Are public right-of-ways maintained to facilitate safe pedestrian passage and shopping carts?
Are we facilitating storage of bicycles and other human-scale vehicles?
Do land use regulations allow for sight-lines and storefront uses that can enhance small business?
Is transit well-integrated with other vehicular and pedestrian infrastructure?
Do public places and byways allow for safe seating and waiting?
Are we continuing to explore the possibilities of reclaimed pedestrian environments?
Are we enhancing or detracting relationships with surrounding natural resource amenities?
Are we encouraging interesting and diverse treatments of private spaces?
How best to cordon off public places in the interest of enhanced security and when are such measures appropriate?
How are we addressing the increasing preoccupation with cell-phones and other electronic devices?
Are we encouraging simultaneous recreation and transportation in urban environments?
How do we protect against the human tendency to cross in front of vehicles without crosswalks?
How can we supply the maintenance and upkeep to assure the success of public places?
What “private” activities should be limited on public rights-of-way?
Let the urban audit begin. Ponder the questions above as you consider the imagery below, in light of your own perspective. You may emerge as an urban policy maker, or, at a minimum, a fellow observer of the pending moments of our urban experience.
Here’s an idea, not new, but worth repeating. Make those nasty, cordoned off potholes what they already are—untouchable neighborhood open space.
Potholes are a perennial, international urban topic, given their tendency to damage unsuspecting vehicles, threaten bicyclists, and impede all modes of traffic. We debate their origin (“did they really start in ancient Rome!?”), allow them a starring role in politics and feature their long repair time as prime examples of budget shortfalls and sponsored fixes here and abroad.
In large cities, repair times can lag. Ironically, because of their usual location firmly within the public domain, private sector or charitable attempts at repair are often deemed inappropriate by transportation officials.
In the interests of health and safety, if they are going to be unattended risks, why not mark them with style like Steve Wheen, London’s “pothole gardener“?
Indeed, make them monuments, green them up—or, more purposefully, fence them off—as yet another pocket of reclaimed guerrilla urbanism.
As the new traffic-calming “woonerfs”, such mini-parks might just accelerate some people’s desired evolution away from the car.
Does the messaging which encourages sustainable forms of development need to alter its vocabulary to be successful?
Yesterday, Wednesday, January 5, I presented on removing barriers to transit-oriented development, sustainable communities and brownfields to a group of real estate lawyers from around the country assembled for a continuing legal education conference in Vail, Colorado.
The presentation is embedded below, and addresses in summary form the range of design, regulatory, fiscal and political issues in metropolitan areas today (with a Washington State focus). Yesterday, it was presented as the basis for a post-recession vocabulary for lawyers as well as clients and peer professionals.
Formal and casual discussion after the presentation was informative. We talked about the ongoing challenge of implementing compact and infill development adjacent to transportation infrastructure. Topics included infrastructure funding, urban streetcar initiatives, and how to address elements of walkable, transit-oriented development to constituencies not initially familiar with urbanist concepts or supportive of increased density.
Some in the audience suggested alternative language to mask hot-button words. Tax-increment financing to fund new infrastructure for transit-oriented development became a “parking fund”. Density was acknowledged as forever outside of some people’s comfort zone. And new neighborhoods aimed at live-work proximity were discussed as sometimes problematic in light of potential restrictions imposed by competing forms of environmental governance such as stormwater and air quality regulation.
I was reminded of twenty years ago, when drafting rural cluster development ordinances designed to protect natural resources. To some “cluster” meant “clutter’. We needed to call such regulations something else–such as “conservation density subdivisions”–to make them acceptable in many venues.
All in all, yesterday’s post-presentation discussions were illuminating in their own right, in response to provocative themes–and a reminder of the importance of holistic dialogue in the evolution from well-meaning dogma to achievable professional and political consensus.
Yes, I know that the authors of the Planetizen-based children’s book, Where Things are From Near to Far found my childhood idol lacking, noting how my favorite frog was outdated and “really trumpeted zoning as the ‘be all and end all’ of the development of cities”.
After all, the perceived shortcomings of the 1952 Neighbor Flap Foot, The City Planning Frog helped motivate Steins and Halbur to produce their own book on urban planning for children in 2008.
But those of us who grew up as children of urban planning professors, the words of of an obscure frog from long ago resonate anew in the age of compact development.
Consider the closing exercise in the book, after Flap Foot says goodbye for the winter:
Perhaps you and a group of your friends could plan ways to improve your neighborhood. You might want to build a model neighborhood, using boxes for houses , stores and other buildings. Draw BEFORE and AFTER pictures. Take BEFORE and AFTER snapshots of places in the neighborhood that you could work together to improve.
Do neighbors meet in your school in the evening? For fun and social affairs? Make a list of the places in your neighborhood where people can meet. Do you have playgrounds within a five-minute walk from your house? Are they safe enough for a little four-year old to reach by himself?
See if your COULD BE neighborhood has all that Flap Foot told Mickey a good neighborhood should have.
–Ewald and Henrickson, Neighbor Flap Foot, the City Planning Frog
Indeed, it could be that Neighbor Flap Foot will stage a comeback in the New Year.
