Category: placemaking

elemental land use and first principles: the overview

On By Chuck WolfeIn Israel, placemaking, politics, sustainability, urban administration, urban views3 Comments

As a legal commodity, land is controlled and subject to various ownership rights and remedies. At both the human and regulatory scales, land is used, accessed, settled as places called villages, towns and cities. In these places, human stories are told, belief systems flourish and codifications emerge about the relationship between land use and the common good.

This week, we are visiting places of first principles, where biblical tenets, Crusades and conflict merge with the familiar balance of modern sprawl, density and urbanism.

As Seattle and peer cities struggle with how best to wed transportation modes and land use, battle lines form over what modes of transportation should be prioritized and the “who gets and who pays” of public infrastructure provision, consider the same debates against the backdrop of the fundamental human history and a seemingly never-ending search for conflict resolution.

Stay tuned.

avoiding the pitfalls of density, redux

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, infill development, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban administration, urban views4 Comments

The March 14, 2010 piece, “Practicing Cautionary Placemaking: Urbanism and the Venetian Ghetto”, was featured in Planetizen on March 15, and has been viewed by thousands worldwide. The May 18, 2010 Real Estate Law & Industry Report (a Bureau of National Affairs publication) will include a reformatted version, which is embedded below:

the legendary darkness of a city night

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, placemaking, Uncategorized, urban views3 Comments

How many of us fear the darkness of the city? Is safety measured by statistics or perception?

Here, from the street, hidden possibilities intrigue the imagination amid open and closed businesses, shadows and light.

the universal urbanism of the baseball field

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, urban views4 Comments

Baseball, borne of street ancestry, has always been the sport of cities. Through perspective, and the lens of new urbanism, today’s modern ballparks display the oft-stated quest for a compact and community-oriented world on foot. We need not seek the validity of urban return through articles and studies. Confirmation is as simple as immersion in the crowd.

forms of placemaking and the role of ruins

On By Chuck WolfeIn infrastructure, placemaking, sustainability, urban views7 Comments

The chatter today is all about placemaking. We have often let “local place” wither away. So we rush to rediscover what landscape essayist J.B. Jackson termed a past golden age–“a time when we seek to restore the world around us to something like its former beauty”.

Along the way, we encounter many types of places, functional and symbolic.

Below, the vital Easter community of St. Peter’s Square in Rome gives way to the evolved and rustic, sea-oriented towns of Port Townsend, Washington, Manarola in the Italian Cinque Terre, and the Orcas, Washington ferry landing.

Here we see transformative places. While function of buildings can evolve, the vitality of place remains as our senses witness new contexts for human interaction with tradition, time and transport. Perhaps now more touristic than pious or seafaring, such places live on.

But is it fair to say that some places are “less place than the next”, because they are new, reflect only modern consumerism or somehow deface an edifice? What of a suburban mall, or mere graffiti along a path?

Surely these are places, too, but with inherent value distinctions. While not downtown, indoor malls remain vital retail centers, and while not museum art, spontaneous expression has legitimacy, often even when rendered without permission or legal sanction.

And finally, what of a gravestone in a company town no longer serving its industry? What of a true ruin, or vestige, such as the Coliseum?

In “The Necessity for Ruins” (1980), Jackson answered unequivocally, first identifying the need for “that interval of neglect” before renewal and reform: ruins “correct history”.

“Ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins”.