‘inevitably urban’ and the role of the people

On September 29, 2014September 29, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban abstractions, urban views, urbanism without effort, vignettes6 Comments

Inevitable Urban Times

These times seem so inevitably urban. Of course, my wry remark comes from a city-dweller in a post-recessionary Seattle, where new construction appears at every turn.

Here, civic dialogue focuses on the social repercussions of growth, such as affordability of urban housing (“build more“, said yesterday’s Seattle Times), the proper range of housing types, and how residents will travel from here to there.

These are also times to think again about how to “create scalable solutions for city leaders to share with their constituencies across the world”, according to The Atlantic’s CityLab 2014 event underway now in Los Angeles.

Attention to human opportunities in the city is now commonplace, with recurring urbanism, placemaking and urban innovation events like CityLab 2014, The Placemaking Leadership Council and The Future of Places all occurring within the last month. Proffered solutions abound, aided by technology, applications and provocative presentations, both live and online.

Oratory and Shakespeare Define the City

But it’s worth remembering that inquiry about the how to fulfill human opportunities is longstanding. There is undeniable precedent in storied oratory, arguably the internet of ancient times.

The Greek poet, Alcaeus of Mytilene (680-511 BC) (as reported by Roman-era sophist Aelius Aristides in later oratory) established human opportunities as central to his definition of the city:

Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well builded, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men [sic] able to use their opportunity [emphasis added].

Sound familiar?

The human part of the built environment has echoed in other, much-quoted prose. Beyond the Greek sophists and orators (themselves criticized for educating only those who could afford the price), Shakespeare’s better known quotation, from Coriolanus, Act 3, Scene 1, also set the tone:

“What is the city but the people?”

What I Learned About Cities

In my case, personal background complements history.

In one of his last presentations, at a major “21st Century City” conference he helped organize in 1988 in Phoenix, my father (late Urban Planning Professor Myer R. Wolfe) quoted Alcaeus in his holistic conference keynote remarks.

How, he asked, can interdisciplinary forces be marshaled to make an accessible urban form (citing Alcaeus’ human “opportunities”) for the 21st century? “The question has to be asked—opportunities for what?”, he noted, pointing to, inter alia, limitations on quality of life inherent in long commutes and related life choices, issues of density v. intensity, as well as urban character across both urban and suburban patterns. (See The City of the 21st Century, M. Pihlak, Ed., Arizona State University, 1988).

In reviewing those remarks just yesterday, his references both to Greek oratory and his predictive questions about this century sent me searching for universal, human imagery. Because it’s the people who define the city, we should look at them, closely.

It’s the People, Stupid

I have compiled 25 photographs for this essay—taken in multiple locations since 2009, including cities on four continents. The photographs are presented in black and white, to better show the contrast between the human and built environment, yet also emphasize the undeniably symmetry between.

My intentions are simple:

First, I want to straightforwardly illustrate fundamental traits of city dwellers across cultures, distance and time. Such traits include talking, eating, singing, watching, shopping, walking, sitting, learning, growing and aging, seeking shelter from climate, and blending with technologies of communication, travel and illumination.

Second, beyond the other ample media available to assess city life and prospects, I want to challenge the reader to think about how best to maximize the opportunities for those pictured, and those around us, and to realistically assess what we see.

As explained here, this story of “urban inevitability” has traveled through sophism—a once-revered (albeit privileged) form of teaching, across the ages. But the very point of such sophism—defining the city on human terms—should not morph to “sophistry”, a more modern term reflective of deceit and specious debate.

Finally, Just Look at the People and Learn

Here’s hoping that the interspersed photographs above and below will illustrate what Alcaeus meant long ago, as revisited in 1988 by my father and in new forms, through the gatherings and events today.

I would venture that to be “able to use the opportunity” of the city is a perpetual challenge best observed in the conduct of the users themselves.

Images composed by the author in Antibes, Arles, Frejus, Grasse and Nice, France; Tel Aviv, Israel; London, UK; Aveiro, Lisbon and Porto, Portugal; Arusha, Tanzania, and Seattle, USA. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.

For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

decoding the place between places

On September 19, 2014September 20, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, place decoding, placemaking, sustainability, urban juxtapositions2 Comments

Third in an illustrated series about place-decoding from the South of France.

Today, many promote urban walkability, but for several years, I have focused on inter-urban, or, even inter-settlement walkability. Strolls through such “places between” not only highlight the virtues of walking itself, but also invoke the universal transitions between distinct locales and the amorphous rural countryside.

Understanding the blend between built and natural, including how balances change closer to clustered settlement, is key to defining sustainable cities going forward.

New urbanists seized on this notion long ago and built new approaches to planning and zoning around the borrowed biological principle of the “transect“. But my purpose here is more observational and humanistic, and to illustrate the dynamic of the “places between” in the context of the “place-decoding” approach that I began exploring earlier this month.

Between towns, it seems there is always a microcosm of similar characteristics defining the edge of urbanity.

Last year I wrote about a Washington State perspective in the Palouse region on the Idaho border, and stressed dissection of the farm-to-market basis for why and how many cities grew, and the reasons forests and farms have been elemental to growth management legislation. I suggested that modern legislative approaches essentially emulate the naturally evolved agricultural region that has always surrounded the City of Rome.

But, as the Rome reference suggests, I believe that inter-urban walkability often resonates best outside of the United States, between towns that grew up at a walkable distance between each other—unremarkably in a mountain valley—or along roads left from civilizations where armies marched home along routes where country became city or town along the way.

One example invokes Rome again. In my Urbanism Without Effort book talks, I like to relate the “Via Appia Method” of place decoding. Take a train several kilometers out from Rome, and walk into the city through regional parkland on the Via Appia, and witness 2000 years of human universals along the way. Burial places of old merge with suburban villas and tourist buses, agriculture and greenbelts abut now over-trafficked country roads.

Another example is farther north in Italy. I’ve also written about the “essence of urbanism” presented by the Cinque Terre towns of Liguria, joined by waterside pedestrian trail, and experienced the even more dramatic Sentiero d’egli dei through steep, cultivated Amalfi coast land between Positano and Amalfi.

And as a capstone last week, I observed the subtleties of the inter-settlement landscape in and around Quenza and Zonza—two proximate small Southern Corsican mountain towns of the Alta Rocca with populations of some 200 and 2000 inhabitants, respectively. A five-hour loop hike between Quenza, a small, declining-in-population village, and Zonza, a more touristic, mountain sports-oriented focal point, invited place-decoding of the microcosm outlined above: From artifacts of religion to agriculture to the cemeteries and leave-behinds that classically occur at the edge of town.

Last year, in the Palouse, I underscored how the elements of older, rural America have reappeared in today’s cities, noting how “small markets, the local bar, the library and the school — no longer needed in one context, they rise again in reinvented urban settings…”.

And last week on Corsica, walking to and from the place between places, I read human fundamentals, as illustrated in the images presented here, in a way that even more firmly decodes and illustrates the elements of urban settlement.

The ebb and flow of nature, economic base and the passage of time are always ripe for observation. Below, take note of one walk’s illustration of two towns, their edges and the spaces between.

The natural transect, the moniker of urban transition

Agriculture, cemeteries and abandoned vehicles on the urban edge—an organic zoning without effort

Fences/property division: an indicator that at some point, the commons disappeared

Religious structures are definitional in Quenza, this one for 1000 years

Zonza, renewed commerce at the core

Tourism is the new economy of survival in rough, now recreational terrain

Images composed by the author along the Via Appia entering Rome, and in Quenza and Zonza, Corsica, France. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.

Coming next: Decoding the elements of a street in Cassis.

For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

public space in motion, from Nice, France

On September 12, 2014September 12, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, lessons learned, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, vignettesLeave a comment

On Saturday, September 13, the 2014 multi-day (and always provocative) Seattle Design Festival features a “Public Space in Motion” panel.

Here, almost live from France, is the panel’s opening presentation:

place-decoding the elements of urbanism

On September 2, 2014September 20, 2014 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, place decoding, placemaking, sustainability, urban views, urbanism without effort22 Comments

First in a series of illustrated ruminations from the South of France.

According to the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen, France is struggling with changing times, including how perception of classic physical space is evolving as the role of cyberspace expands. Ambiguities range from the changing nature of central State political power, to the incongruous starting place of Tour de France 2014: not in France but in England.

As Cohen wrote in early July about one prospective premise for the current French struggle with modernity:

[N]owhere else is the particularity of place and the singularity of a person’s attachment to it more important.

In continuing my focus on the baselines of today’s urbanism, Cohen’s apt statement explains why I am writing on an occasional basis from France through November. There is nowhere better, in my opinion, to see the old world basis for the role of urban places, and how they define who we are in the urban context.

In the narrow streets and pass-through places of old world urban cores, latent answers to urban riddles await our quizzical view. These answers are worthy of histories, sensational fiction and last, but not least, the inquiry of urbanists.

Consider a Dan Brown approach to the study of cities, something we could easily call “place-decoding”.

Place-decoding, like the Urbanism Without Effort I have written about before, is the necessary prerequisite to placemaking going forward. The observational lessons of place-decoding illustrate embedded patterns within the urban form. Many such patterns need notice and forethought based on their precedent and inevitable recurrence.

We need only a few late summer photographs from the historic center of Aix-en-Provence and the small Corsican port of Erbalunga to further set the tone.

Each photograph suggests an element of placemaking for further consideration, around which a city will grow (as shown by surrounding modern development only a stone’s throw away).

Each shows latent human behavior and natural and market forces in process—all of which can lead to consequent debates about policies, plans and regulations.

Require setbacks to preserve light and air? Assure safe passage for the elderly? Honor the walkable places of the past, present and future? Foster successful interactions of private business and public ways? Create safety at all hours for street diners and children at play?

We will not find the answers to these questions in solely the printed word, or in assumed approaches to urban life. Rather, these are the riddles of the old world worth illustrating and asking again, in places where their inspiration remains on eternal display—begging for rediscovery, decoding and translation to modern life.

Coming next: a model for altering human senses in a public space

For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

timeless or time-bound in the city?

On August 18, 2014February 25, 2024 By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views, vignettes2 Comments

Take away context clues, and cities become more interesting matrices—with blank cells to complete—where each of us personalizes how space meets time.

A uniform filter applied to multiple urban scenes can easily warp time and location, and obscure—yet somehow enhance—the reality of place.

This simple premise informs our point of view about city life. For every image, topic or discipline, our values and belief systems inform what we see, especially when familiar guideposts get filtered away.

Remove color, crop, leave only hint and nuance, and the city can become an off-trail place where inquiry is a form of intellectual rescue and rediscovery.

In the ten examples below, five questions set the tone for this rediscovery process:

Is it apparent when the photo occured?
Is the location clear? If so, is such clarity based on personal familiarity with the location?
Is the context of the scene readily understandable? What more would be needed to offer a more complete answer to questions of when and where?
Which element of urban life seems the most important to the composition (e.g. safety, environment, mode of transportation, role of public space, public/private interface)?
What questions remain?

The answers are for each of us to develop and consider, but one message stands out. Take apart the most fundamental things we see everyday. Inquire, and on the rebound, literally and figuratively, each of us will see things in a whole new light.

An interesting footnote: I captured all photos above between 2010 and 2014, on four different continents. During test runs on Facebook, several people commented that most of the photos looked dated, and many did not believe that I was the photographer, nor Lightroom the robber of color.

Perhaps ironically, the city featured the most (Seattle), is barely 160 years old. The second-to-last photo (Jerusalem) belies simultaneous claims of place dating back thousands of years. Yet the antique filter creates equal partners in the rediscovery process.

The other photos show, inter alia, how a shopping gallery floor (Sydney) still projects a historic building’s nineteenth century pattern, how London streets and former Lisbon fairgrounds are both fair game for blended bicycle traffic, and how a classic older car (Minneapolis) can cast a retro-era feel on an entire intersection.

For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

myurbanist

Category: pedestrianism

‘inevitably urban’ and the role of the people

Inevitable Urban Times

Oratory and Shakespeare Define the City

What I Learned About Cities

It’s the People, Stupid

Finally, Just Look at the People and Learn

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decoding the place between places

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public space in motion, from Nice, France

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place-decoding the elements of urbanism

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timeless or time-bound in the city?

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Inevitable Urban Times

Oratory and Shakespeare Define the City

What I Learned About Cities

It’s the People, Stupid

Finally, Just Look at the People and Learn

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