Successful cities have always blended human activity, natural systems and the built environment with easy grace.
Here, in that tradition, Portugal’s second city recently embraced the rain. In the image below, climate and river, bridge and bystanders inspired, even amid the misplaced darkness of a Spring storm.
Image of Porto, Portugal composed by the author. Click for more detail.
As I’ve recently written, visual urban nostalgia has a place in today’s dialogue about cities. Historical photos, videos and reconstructions of a pre-car era, including imagery of more walkable places are all sources of inspiration for a more sustainable urban future. And they are brought to us, by and large, by the internet.
Click on a link, and the romanticized past appears as a visual analogue to a sound byte about “then and now”. But what about the sound byte itself? For example, as I asked last year–amid “street scenes and carriage jams”— what did the social nature of traffic interactions actually sound like in the late nineteenth century?
The problem is that sound is amorphous, and not easily reconstructed, however important a role it may play in the quality of the urban past, present and future. Consider the “phonautogram” efforts of Thomas Edison colleague Charles Batchelor in 1872 in an urban setting. Click here for a barely audible recording of New York City’s Metropolitan Elevated Railroad, 40 feet away.
Nonetheless, study of “soundscapes“—particularly in the urban environment—has grown from its academic foundation in Vancouver by R. Murray Schafer in the 1960’s. The urban soundscape is an increasing focal point worldwide. Sound-based urban initiatives appear both as prospective planning tools and as historical, documentary exercises to inform an urban past.
Prospectively, soundscapes are an element of the urban environment. Soundscape proponents argue for assistance from the aural as well as the visual, in order to facilitate the identity of a place through careful, qualitative attention to how it sounds.
For instance, one click, here, provides background on the “acoustic landscapes” in Cologne, Germany, and the evolution of Schafer’s thinking when applied to modern Berlin. The Goethe Institute provides perspective from American American Yukio King, who worked on Berlin sound issues:
As at Helmholtzplatz in the East Berlin borough of Prenzlauer Berg. All you could hear there a few years ago were barking dogs and clinking beer bottles. Now that many young families have moved into the neighbourhood, the cries of children drown out these sounds: which King feels has enhanced the area in acoustic terms.
In addition, King attempted a dialogue in another Berlin neighborhood which emphasized the benefits of classic :
In his 2007 project Urban Soundmarks, he not only documented the soundscape of a neighbourhood in Neukölln, a disadvantaged area in the south of Berlin, but drew up an urban planning concept that incorporated sound design and presented it to the borough council. His suggestion was that open-air cafes or a market could acoustically improve this relatively quiet neighbourhood.
Historic attention to soundscapes literally echo the visual and focus on hearing as well as seeing the qualities of cities over time.
Scholars have focused on the recreation of urban sounds to aid in the understanding of historic urban experiences, sometimes at an IMAX-like level. Berlin’s National Museums provide a good, ongoing example in this year’s dramatic exhibition about the ancient. classical city of Pergamon. Sounds accompany a panoramic reconstruction, as “[a]udio impressions including day and night simulations, complete with sunrise and sunset, and ambient sound effects that recreate life in an ancient city, allow the visitor to experience a whole day in Pergamon.”
Similarly, Pittsburgh-based non-profit Public VR‘s website offers an in-process reconstruction of ancient Pompeii’s theater district, which is silent for now, but will soon contain ambient sounds composed with simulated ancient Roman musical instruments.
In another effort, funded research has allowed multinational work on reconstruction of urban soundscapes in renaissance Spain through the study of “musicians, performers, institutions, composers, instrument makers, copyists, printers, consumers, blind balladeers and many others across a broad social spectrum”.
Whether directed to shaping the future soundscape or understanding past examples, one thing is clear. Sight and sound both play roles in understanding cities, and the role of sound is ripe for further exploration.
Pergamon graphic courtesy of Berlin National Museums. All other images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.
A similar version of this post first appeared in The Atlantic Cities.
In the images above, the historic American yard and parking strip reappear as balcony and roof garden in an urban condominium setting on the left. Meanwhile, as shown on the right, nearby conventional neighborhoods show exposed yard and curbside space beyond mere front lawns.
In the end, what do the images show about American cities, private residential property and the curbside next door?
Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry at Sustainable Cities Collective, “Reading the Eclectic Urban Curbside”, and includes additional text and images. For the remainder, click here.
An abandoned cable car bridge in Seattle (pictured here in multiple views) could carry the same message of reinvention as New York City’s celebrated High Line, the notable elevated railway-turned-park.
In “The Necessity for Ruins” (1980), landscape essayist J.B. Jackson explained that such leftover edifices often inspire us “to restore the world around us to something like its former beauty”. I’ve often written of Jackson’s advocacy for the use of ruins—not for what we now call “urban exploration” of abandoned places—but to reclaim what worked before.
With Jackson in mind, I often look for walkable, bikeable and transit-oriented places, reminiscent of times gone by. Such places are already inherent in the evolving city around us—remnants of earlier land uses and infrastructure eerily similar to what pundits call for today. These leftovers merge with changing lifestyles, and illustrate firsthand Jackson’s championing of accessible, nostalgic vestiges of an urban past.
In Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood (as illustrated by these photos), the city of 2012 overlays the city of 1930. As the use of automobiles increased, infrastructure, such as the former cable car bridge, went out of service. In 1940, the cable car line was abandoned and replaced by a bus line.
These images of Frink Park (a portion of the 1903 Olmsted park plan), are consistent with today’s urbanist ideals, and show the juxtaposition of the bridge, bicyclist and pedestrian. On the old track-bed, a piece of the park now continues, and becomes a trail through the hillside woods above.
How would Jackson interpret the cable car remains? Have they been lost to time, or are they an example of the inspirational reminder which Jackson describes?
I choose the Jackson view.
Nearby, today’s light rail is assuming the former role of the cable car. The Sound Transit tracks proceed northward, as the buildout of the region’s light rail system continues. In the next decade, light rail will turn east as well, and cross Lake Washington, not far south of the cable car’s former terminus—a dock for a long discontinued trans-lake ferry.
As Jackson noted, “Ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins”. So too, they give incentive for finding your own “High Line”, often just next door.
Initial image courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives. Remainder of images composed by the author. Click on each image for detail.
A similar version of this post first appeared in The Atlantic Cities.
How will the city of tomorrow reflect adaptive reuse of the city of today?
I don’t think we ask that question broadly enough, and our day-to-day, property-specific incrementalism can easily overshoot the greatest lessons from history for today’s city politics, regulation and economic constraints.
A hometown case in point, last week, transported me from Seattle to Croatia for inspiration about why we should think beyond limited geographies, time frames and lifetimes when we discuss urban redevelopment options.
Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry at The Atlantic Cities, “What the History of Diocletian’s Palace Can Teach Us About Adaptive Reuse”. For the remainder, click here.
Image credits: Comparative aerial photos from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license.