Category: placemaking

coloring the urban experience

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views17 Comments

Color does not add a pleasant quality to design – it reinforces it.

–Pierre Bonnard, Painter and Printmaker

Consider the role color plays in an everyday urban experience, how and why.  No  matter that some aspects of color in the city are naturally occurring;  manipulation of color is well within the reach of most city dwellers, and is one of the most easily and affordably altered urban characteristics.

Here are ten observations.

Color:

  • Defines different facets of the natural environment and contrasts the natural and built environments.
  • Further differentiates elements of the built environment, such as building types or features.
  • Highlights people as well as places.
  • Is an indicator of commercial activity, and subliminally compels attention to vendors and merchandise.
  • Contrasts and defines messages on public and private signage announcing regulation, location and the opportunity for transaction.
  • Brightens rights of way and frames journeys across alleys, roadways and in various modes of transport.
  • Whether natural or artificial, can illuminate the urban night, and can provide a sense of safety in darkness.
  • Provides visual contrasts that stimulate the urban experience.
  • Can be particularly uplifting when enhanced by the sun, especially sky and water blues, vegetation greens and building-paint reds.
  • Can be used to awaken and inspire as part of a local improvement effort.

The following international images illustrate these observations, and, how in defining the urban experience, color is a major influence.

How can we marshal the potential of urban color while retaining a legally appropriate balance between public regulation of the private realm? I suggest this question is as important to cities—and far less discussed—than many other elements of today’s urban agenda.

[showtime]

For a recent provocative view of the role of color in architecture, see last year’s post by Ana Maria Manzo, here.  Click on each image for more detail.

“diagram no. 3” and more memories of the roots of urbanism

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, placemaking4 Comments

In the course of an 1848 speech, Benjamin Disraeli said that “a precedent embalms a principle”.

Today’s first myurbanist entry identified early principles of Roman “placemaking” as captured by Vitruvius.

This second entry recalls an intriguing diagram from almost two thousand years later which may have played a similar foundational role.

Writing in Green-Belt Cities in 1946, Frederic Osborn noted his candidate for the roots of a neighborhood focus in city planning— “precisely [within] the principles of development so lucidly expounded in” Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of Tomorrow “and exemplified in the two Garden Cities which Howard founded…”

“He reinvented the neighborhood unit idea, which is to be found in More’s Utopia, and is implied in our system of local-government wards, but had been forgotten by townsmen…”

Osborn no doubt refers to Howard’s proposal that “… it is an important part of the project that each ward, or one-sixth part of the city, should be in some sense a complete town by itself, and thus the school buildings might serve, in the earlier stages, not only as schools, but as places for religious worship, for concerts, for libraries, and for meetings of various kinds….”

'Diagram No. 3', the school-centered ward. The modern origin of neighborhood planning? From Howard, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1902

Here, Howard encapsulated much of the neighborhood unit and then-contemporary “community center” movement, foreshadowed Clarence Perry by some 20 years, and, in his “Diagram No. 3,” perceptively showed the school at the ward’s center, a railroad station at the ward’s corner, and industry separated at the periphery.

As noted before, the challenges of integration of neighborhood and the city are not new, and may forever live on.

density and multi-modal, by any other name

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, environmental and land use law, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, urban administration13 Comments

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.

Colorado January 2011

a placemaking question from the sky

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, placemaking, urban abstractions, urban views7 Comments

Blog posts can be notorious both for novelty and content, and therefore downright experimental.

In that spirit, live at 35,000 feet, here is a question. Is the sky the place, or the high density, city-microcosm within the airplane cabin?

(Posted while airborne, January 3).

childhood urbanism: remembering Neighbor Flap Foot

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, housing, pedestrianism, placemakingLeave a comment

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.