When a small branch of a local ice cream business opened within the laundromat up the street, it was evidence that today’s land use regulations are becoming more in sync with changing urban reality.
Recently, I have been focusing on the potential artifacts of urban life in cities as they grow more dense. Last week, I asked about the fate of the front lawn.
Today, in the spirit of the ice cream laundry, I’m switching from what we may lose to what we may gain: the looming fusion businesses of tomorrow.
For instance, what is the fate of technology of convenience such as individual washers and dryers? In what central places can we share, combine and “fuse” their use?
My neighborhood is not alone. Consider Copenhagen’s celebrated Laundromat Cafe, which has fused more than ice cream with laundry, and inspired a trend. Note also some American spin-and-dine examples, such as San Francisco’s Brain Wash.
In order to enable fusion businesses, land use regulations may need more flexibility. In this case, conventional zoning often segregated food service uses from more “industrial” uses such as laundries. In addition. smaller start-ups may have been prohibited within existing uses, with walk-up service limited in scope.
Reform efforts can and should reinvent such conventional impediments to the more efficient, compact city life, and allow the flexibility of innovation and redefined urban traditions. As currently proposed Seattle efforts illustrate, reforms aimed at more livable places can be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and can enable more employment closer to home.
Beyond regulatory reform, in today’s sustainable city, it’s good to foster shared consumption lifestyles and functional, multi-purpose venues, whether fad, fancy or emerging reality.
Want to track shared consumption examples and the fusion dynamic? I highly recommend shareable.net for a one-stop check on the latest on bike-sharing, car-sharing and prognostication on the next sustainable recombination of the way we live.
After suggesting last week that policymakers should plan for urban density’s inevitable displacement of less efficient, but important land uses, I began to focus on specific elements of the American city and suburb with a high risk of loss.
So began an exploratory tour of the iconic front yard and lawn. Long protected by cultural position—and zoning setbacks—is the classic Leave it to Beaver lot configuration really part of a sustainable future?
Density advocates would suggest otherwise. Seattle blogger Roger Valdez, who has both entertained and exasperated with his recent, often satirical tour of Seattle’s Land Use Code, wrote yesterday: “Yards should be next on our list after parking in terms of code reform.”
As an attribute shared by “England’s colonial children,” Gardner argues the front lawn as socially and environmentally wasteful, yet often still required based on an outdated landscape tradition. He suggests that unlike numerous international examples, “alternative single-family residential designs may simply have been scrubbed from the collective imagination” in the United States.
Speculations by Valdez and Gardner are not new to the planning profession or to land use lawyers and developers.
However, Valdez shows us that discussions of what city space is needed for private landholders is now beyond professional debate, and part of the popular urbanist dialogue.
Meanwhile, Gardner has a particularly good range of visuals from across the world, and his examples show that small patios, simple window greenery, hedges and trellises may be the only front yards that people really need.
In those cities where urban density increases, and American “castle grounds” actually redevelop and contract, will anything tangible really be lost to future generations?
My guess is that many will find new forms of functional private space, and their front yard will expand to include the neighborhood, or, perhaps, the city as whole.
All images composed by the author. Thanks to Christopher Leinberger for his occasional contrasts of urbanism between the traditional “Leave it to Beaver” and more recent “Seinfeld” models.
Last week, George Monbiot of The Guardian sounded the urbanist alarm.
The cause? In order to offset strains on infrastructure, an Australian provincial initiative is offering stipends to Sydney residents who leave town.
Monbiot’s response included a headline which was nothing short of an international clarion renouncing this short-term fix. “Sustainable cities must be compact and high-density,” he said, while arguing for strong planning laws to stay the course.
Monbiot joins a legion of many who embrace the thesis of David Owen’s New York City-based “Green Metropolis“— and aptly suggest that the compact, less auto-dependent city is our necessary, sustainable future.
Monbiot’s tout towards planning is appropriate, but just what does it mean? For one thing, we must ponder the impacts of displacement, because there may no longer be enough room for life—or death—as we know it.
If our cities are to become more dense, what will become of uses and properties which do not present optimal uses of urban land? As the disfavored car dealerships, warehouses and low-rise strip malls reconfigure and yield to more concentrated uses, policymakers should be forward thinking in their prescriptions for the changing city.
Will some positive or necessary, low density urban traditions also be dispossessed? Where will they go in a gradually reshaped, sprawl-free urban system?
My choice of Latin words above— “clarion,” “legion” and “thesis”— are not accidental. In classical precedent, there are thought-provoking lessons, still visible at will.
Consider Rome, and learning from the landscape of an iconic walk in the Appia Antica Park on its outskirts.
Opened in 312 B.C., the Via Appia (the “queen of the long roads” of ancient military transport and commerce) traversed ancient Italy from Rome to the Adriatic port of Brindisi.
All along the walk today, over original paving stones, ruins flank the roadway—remnants of burial monuments, statues, tombs and towers.
Sometime after 200 A.D., burials were banned in the city, because of crowding and land values. Catacombs on the periphery offered mass internments to the growing religious population. Along the main thoroughfares, further beyond the city walls, the wealthy adorned the roadsides with personal and family tributes— now an outdoor museum of bygone sprawl.
In ancient Rome, density drove out the dead, and changed the landscape in unanticipated ways, still visible today. It’s a legacy worth noting after two thousand years.
If our cities must be dense to be competitive and sustainable, we must also look with care to the potential displacement of uses, institutions or traditions—not to mention the artifacts we will leave behind.
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 archaeology of today’s urban regions need not be excavation-based. One trick allows the illusion of memory through photographic tools.
Here are three photographs taken just yesterday, at an under-leased, small suburban mall awaiting reinvention. A mixed use redevelopment lost momentum with the recession, and what is left is an in-between place.
In this venue, imagery of the in-between collapses time, and enhances empty—and lonely—spaces, suggesting ghosts of strollers and shoppers from not so long ago.
I suggest that local photographs can accentuate, in your midst, an Ostia Antica—the ruins of the abandoned seaport of ancient Rome—now isolated from the sea.
This is important, because accelerating history through imagery can add to our sense of immediacy, in search of the best ways to reinvent the urban, suburban and exurban environments around us.
