Category: placemaking

remembering Steve Jobs, and the art of land use persuasion

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, placemaking, politics, urban administration10 Comments

Steve Jobs’ last public appearance was as a land use advocate, presenting plans for Apple’s circular new headquarters to the Cupertino City Council just four months ago tomorrow.

“Pretty cool” and “like a spaceship has landed” made the news last June, because Jobs was talking like pundits expected, while framing the rollout of something special, fresh and new.

Notwithstanding Jobs’ emphasis on heavy landscaping and subsurface parking, Philip Langdon has criticized the proposal in urbanist circles for its fenced, office park setting of glass and the auto-centric suburbia of old.

Familiar architectural critics have also cross-examined the premise of London’s Foster+Partners’ design. The Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Hawthorne termed it nothing short of a “retrograde cocoon”, while Paul Goldberger in The New Yorker last month questioned whether the building’s enormity would leave Jobs’ last contribution to his company as the least meaningful of his career.

I’m suspending judgment on the building for now, to focus on style and Jobs’ relentless pursuit of dreams. Last June 7, the way he presented and argued, with retiring charm, lit up the room.

Three years of law school does not teach that kind of persuasion. Such artful persistence was Jobs’ magical power, a quality which we should always remember.

Video courtesy of City of Cupertino, City Channel. Click on video to see Steve Jobs’ presentation.

how temporary and simple places can define city life

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, placemaking, sustainability12 Comments

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.

how the imagery of “urbanized” motivates better places

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, placemaking, politics, sustainability, transit oriented development, urban administration4 Comments
Seattle-based writer and futurist Alex Steffen (left) joins Gary Hustwit on stage

As a survey text in visual form, Gary Hustwit’s Urbanized is a frank introduction to the buzz about cities in our age of right-minded sustainability. Lurking amid the narration and vignettes is a scalable world view where the car is no longer king, and community priorities rather than government mandates often set the agenda for change.

Seattle had the chance to view Hustwit’s new release last night, and in my estimation, the audience saw local issues reflected back from the screen, as will city-dwellers everywhere who attend an Urbanized presentation. Hustwit clearly succeeds in highlighting a universal cast of diverse and sometimes conflicting stakeholders who must balance and integrate ideas, technology and economic forces characteristic of an urbanizing world.

Other articles about Urbanized have set the stage well, among them a Hustwit interview in TheCityFix, a review by Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times (who notes Southern California is missing in Hustwit’s lexicon) and a concise entry by Nate Berg on the new Atlantic Cities site.

In short, Hustwit, while not an architect or urban planner, aptly synthesizes the hottest urban issues—from carbon neutrality to safety to human-scale transportation. He employs voices of the well known, the lesser known, and fast-moving urban imagery, which guides the film from Mumbai to Santiagp, to Brasila, Bogota and around the world.

I’ve written lately about the value of imagery in conveying the messages of cities. In this context, Urbanized gives rich meaning to street scenes, infrastructure, and the single building as part of an urban framework.

Through the film’s masterful editing, reality abounds.

Santiago slum dwellers participate in the design of new dwellings, and choose bathtubs over water heaters to escape the communal shower left behind. Brasilia is a planned joy from the air, yet a disconnected trek for the pedestrian. Beijing, with narration by architect Yung Ho Chang, becomes a city of wide avenues no longer a place where friends cross paths. Adjacent to Cape Town, in the township of Khayelitsha, a community project team builds safety through light and other urban design features.

Hustwit also honors his cast and blends them skillfully with their environments.

Former Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñalosa is one with the bus rapid transit and bicycle infrastructure which made his reputation. Landscape Architect James Corner hears the noises around him on New York’s High Line and acknowledges them as an undeniable piece of the urban experience. And the camera is loyal to the anthropological perspectives presented by Danish urban designer Jan Gehl as he suggests angles of view characteristic of evolved homo sapiens in their urban habitat.

While some have said that Urbanized is more primer than graduate seminar, it is still a must-see as a one-sitting wonder. Seldom do we get to see the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz espouse optimism for cities as opportune laboratories for reinvention and competition, within moments of dramatic scenes of tension between citizens and government. Hustwit has a knack of mixing and matching, and merging problem with opportunity.

A visual triumph, Urbanized could nonetheless feature more cities, reference more history and, sometimes better blend the film’s talking heads with the community they espouse.

Yet the film says more than meets the eye, and in my view, issues an undeniable challenge to all who embrace cities: capture ideas, and make better urban places going forward.

Initial image composed by the author at the Egyptian Theater, Seattle.

exploring success of the nighttime city

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, politics, sustainability, urban views39 Comments
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.

rediscovering the urban eye of a child

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views12 Comments

Well-composed photographs are an essential part of understanding urbanism. I have suggested before that writing about city life (in an urban diary) can be best enhanced with a camera. A recent overseas trip only strengthened that point of view.

Prior to rediscovering four photographs, now digitized here, my thoughts about cameras did not entertain the child’s sense of the city. But upon rediscovery, I recalled a not unusual, hand-me-down dynamic of family tradition. My father was an urban planning professor, and, while growing up, I watched him photograph for purposes of later sketching, teaching and advocating the role of urban imagery.

In a 1965 article (M.R. Wolfe, “A Visual Supplement to Urban Social Studies”), he argued that several then-leading studies of American communities (e.g. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City and Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown) partially missed the mark because they lacked diagrams and pictures:

Many social studies of communities refer implicitly or explicitly to urban form without so much as a picture, map or diagram. Yet visual material can make a contribution to understanding the urban environment itself, the interrelationship of society and environment, and the development of techniques for study and communication.

Acknowledging an inherited penchant for city observation only spurred a further question—will my own children, now college age, have similar inclinations?

My daughter, who is a geography major, hinted at some further inter-generational osmosis, while studying in Italy this past summer. My son, who is a journalism major, seems to be a different sort of chronicler, with a focus on words and artwork for now.

Several commentators have recently written about the role of children in defining the urban environment going forward. Kaid Benfield, citing to Scott Doyon, wed smart growth and smart parenting, and the merit of a child-oriented approach to help define community livability.

Witness their cited measures of success such as safe trips to buy a popsicle.

A child’s safe popsicle journey is only the foundation for urban exploration. Given the symbiotic relationship between parenting, children and defining community, we should offer opportunity whenever possible for children to photograph and interpret cities.

For instance, what if we were able to send children around the world, on a kid’s photo contest with an urban twist? What if we gifted such journeys and a camera, and said:

“Look around and decide what you like about what you see. Take photos and explain them by telling us what is important to you, including what you wish was around you in your city.”

The rediscovered photographs illustrated here provide a retrospective example of such a gift. I took them in 1968, on one of several opportune trips with my urban planning professor father. They were taken with my first true camera—a Kodak Instamatic—which produced the 26mm, grainy renderings now emulated by iPhone applications such as Hipstamatic.

Frankly, I do not remember taking these photos, nor whether I was imitating the shots my father might have taken moments before. But 43 years later, here is my belated “contest entry” explanation of what I liked and was trying to show:

  • Cities organized around important public places, like churches and squares and towers.
  • Monuments located in these public places, some new, and some that have been there a very long time, to honor people or events from history.
  • Notable walking areas where people were separated from cars.
  • Cities that honored the water around them, and built themselves so that things were close together and work was close to home.
  • Cities where, in the face of a wall, there were different layers from several eras, that told the story of how the city grew.

Twelve year olds today need not wait almost half a century before answering “what you like about what you see.”

And I’ll wager that even without the benefit of my admitted hindsight, their answers, and urban diaries, would advance the dialogue of communities ripe for inheritance and renewal.


All images composed by the author in Rovinj and Split, Croatia, and Udine, Italy in 1968. Click on each image for more detail. Cross-posted in The Atlantic on September 23 and Sustainable Cities Collective on September 22.