Category: placemaking

corners as the baseline of urbanism

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views23 Comments

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.

creating the urban diary

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, urban views22 Comments

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.

Websites celebrate the possibilities for narrow streets in Los Angeles, alleys in Seattle, walkability in Dallas, and the legacy of Jane Jacobs’ urban spaces. in particular, small-scale. multimedia producers such as Streetfilms document and celebrate notable examples—usually cities of inspiration from around the world.

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.

All images composed by the author.

making big urban ideas happen through idea management

On By Chuck WolfeIn environmental and land use law, everyday urbanism, placemaking, politics, sustainability, urban administration5 Comments

Lately, there is no shortage of reporting about big urban ideas and visions of what will make places great.

For David Roberts, writing in Grist, the answers are conceptual, e.g. assurance of ecological sustainability and density, while Crosscut contributor Mark Hinshaw lauds great projects in the making through citation to the “verve, variety and vitality” of James Corner’s early rethinking of the Seattle waterfront—with a city-wide focal point in mind.

But where is the realism, and why does it matter?

In a recent Financial Times article, Edwin Heathcoate dissected the ever-popular lists of great cities and acknowledged that such rankings are often based on individual taste—in response to the qualities that the identified cities present.  However, Heathcoate’s goal was not to organize a ‘liveable city” list based on successful implementation of a big urban idea.

For me, as a practitioner, I am anchored on the “how” to make big urban ideas happen. Once a big idea is vetted—whether in an authoritarian or democratic way—what assures its success? Most particularly, what if, from Day One, the vision pushes comfort zones of the achievable; politically, legally or monetarily?

I suggest reality-checks from the beginning, which includes careful and contextual due diligence—reflecting back and showing some immediate grounding of what detractors might argue as the pie-in the-sky.  Call it “idea management” in the urban arena.

To return to the Seattle example, on the waterfront:  Grand, “make no little plans” visions are afoot, in a purposeful, unconstrained exercise led by james corner field operations that contemplates a merger of natural systems and urbanity. With a considered framework (summarized nicely by Cristina Bump here) a presentation in Seattle by Corner and his team last Thursday night brought the potential of a new city orientation towards the city’s nascent Elliott Bay, with the potential of reclaimed beaches, green piers, terraced topography-sensitive runoff and new, waterside gathering places.

Hinshaw frames the successful rebirth of the Seattle waterfront by artful hint—now is not the time for curmudgeons—rather, it is the time for courtship in an urban Spring.

Regeneration of the waterfront in Seattle and other cities worldwide (see plans for Perth, Australia, here) is but one example of potential implementation of the big urban idea. But big ideas can fail without the idea management of due diligence—a catalog of what will, can and could happen.

Without a simultaneous catalog of due diligence checklists (even if they are kept under cover), visions risk repudiation and rancor. In reaching this conclusion, nothing has impressed me more than first-hand learning from the Jerusalem light rail project —off budget, off schedule, full of geopolitical questions and implementation snafus.  Ironically, as I recounted in 2010, project implementers noted that:

BRT [bus rapid transit] is more viable in Jerusalem given far less need for excavation and utility relocation, and, echoing sentiments in other Israeli cities, probably should have been the mode of choice to begin with.

The project is almost done today, with opening scheduled for later this year—five years late.

So in conclusion, I suggest no moderation in the generation of big urban ideas, no doom-saying.  But I hope amid all of the vision, the checklists are forming.

Even beyond the seemingly universal challenge of funding for vision, the pitfalls of process and delay remain—concerned neighbors, overlapping agency jurisdictions, related regulations and other stakeholder review will often come to light.

Through idea management, let’s use existing tools and invent new ones so that big urban ideas do not die before their time.

All photographs composed by the author. Seattle waterfront graphic courtesy of City of Seattle/james corner field operations.

Obama and the Middle East, urban sustainability and detente

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, housing, infrastructure, Israel, myurbanist international, placemaking, politics, sustainability, transit oriented development, urban administration, urban views2 Comments

Could sustainability principles pave the path to peace?

President Obama’s strategic statements about the Middle East last Thursday (and as clarified to AIPAC on Sunday) were not city-specific, but took me back one year to Jerusalem and in-person perspectives on the city’s prospects.

My 2010 reflections, reproduced below, capture individuals still in the news, and the issues of today’s urbanism, boundaries and ecosystems in Jerusalem—considerations well worth heeding in response to the President’s focus on borders, and his call to embrace the choice “between the shackles of the past and the promises of the future.”

In Jerusalem, a municipal administration rides a pendulum between sustainability and geopolitics.

Greenbelts, light rail, complete street-making, and the storied demolition orders for Palestinian homes in a floodway: all live on a world stage.

Last week, addressing Pacific Northwest professionals visiting with Seattle-based i-SUSTAIN, Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur prescribed the ultimate sustainable urbanism, drawing from a Hebrew phrase. Jerusalem must “emerge from its [many] walls,” old and new, she argued, and enhance the city’s diverse, public areas largely already shared by all.

The Jerusalem of gathering spaces and neighborhoods is already present, she claimed, and should no longer grow out in rings of settlements, but should preserve compact neighborhoods based on affinity, interlinked by public transit and defining connectors such as the Jaffa Road and the Street of the Prophets.

The tools? Public process, for one, even in areas annexed after the 1967 Six-Day War, to help define a collective local voice.

Her systemic analysis of the city is familiar and compelling, as she simultaneously seeks to avoid a Nicosia outcome (a reference to the divided Cyprus to the northwest). Arguably, she is peacemaking on a platform of the sustainable city.

For instance, Tsur thinks at night about the infrastructure lacking in East Jerusalem, and how the city should rise above the intractable and remedy untreated eastern watershed drainage, which flows directly to the Dead Sea. It would be feasible, she says, to pump this sewage to the state-of-the-art treatment plant that already treats the western watershed sewage, and create drinking water through sustainable technology.

Meanwhile, in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, along the Kidron Valley, just below the City of David and Hezekiah’s water tunnel, Fakhri Abu Diab thinks at night about other things — like what to tell his children about the potential fate of the family house which still “carries the smell of his mother.” As recently reported by The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner, the Abu Diab house was one of several that received a demolition order, because it was expanded without a permit and is the potential location of an archaeological park at the base of excavations already mired in the complexities of political archeology — a search not only to document biblical events, but seen by detractors as a Jewish land-claim process in disguise.

In Abu Diab’s view, the post-1967 municipality has ignored him before, and he lacks confidence in the proposed relocation offer, which is under negotiation for a move to higher ground.

Walls, sleepless nights, conflict, water, and a future for children. The human condition speaks loudly in this most urban of cities, as the debate over the future of Jerusalem brings a reality-television aura to local land-use administration.

The original article also appeared in Crosscut, here.

Portland: framing the question of place

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, transit oriented development, urban views14 Comments

Visits to other cities can easily create “grass is always greener responses” which are hardly complete analyses of a place and its problems.

Yet these human, spontaneous gestalts are worth noting, because they say something about the immediate look and feel of location, and can constitute authentic perceptions of the best of urbanism.

My role in Portland, Oregon last Friday was to present the results of my recent, co-authored study on transit-oriented and urban center development to a meeting of the American Bar Association’s State and Local Government Law Section—and then to co-lead a bus tour on specific, local examples—from the Lloyd District to the Pearl District and beyond.

In keeping with the spirit of gestalt, something very human happened along the way.

For the past few years, Portland has inspired urbanist writers because of an advanced transportation system (including light rail, streetcar and bicycle), a highly walkable downtown, and development practices which have captured the imagination of a new generation of city-oriented populists.

In particular, two of the best urbanist articles about Portland, William Fulton’s summary of why Portland works and Dan Bertolet’s comparison with Seattle, led me to my own gloss.

From a fundamental, “read the city” perspective, downtown Portland and its close-in neighborhoods capture the best of an urban experience. The scale, street surfaces and sidewalk furnishings occur amid integrated, yet appropriately separated transportation modes and supportive green spaces. Innovative business and community groups have leveraged proximity to transit and managed parking through successful development strategies.

All lead to irresistible memories of examples from elsewhere and a universal question:

How can we capture this experience in my city?

Perhaps such a fundamental human response is the best metric of all, and the key to achieving a livable place.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail. Cross-posted in The Huffington Post and Sustainable Cities Collective.