Today, across the world, in multiple contexts, the allure of the bicycle knows no bounds.
Commencing with the atmosphere of Florence, at night above, the images presented here provide multiple examples of the urban bicycle in practice, whether whimsical, functional or historical.
All images composed by the author in Canada, France, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Tanzania and the United States. Click on each image for more detail.
Rural Africa, ripe for city skills, without cities
Microfinance—the practice of personal small loans to spur creativity in developing nations—had well-known rural roots. Of late, I had assumed that the practice had become a city-based endeavor, in concert with other programs, targeting the world’s burgeoning urban populations.
Time in Africa earlier in the year did not change that perception.
However, after following up with community economic development friends back home, I learned that fostering a rural middle class should spur reflection among those passionate about cities. Sometimes, finding a way to keep a meaningful rural existence trumps city life.
According to Cole Hoover, Director of Programs for Seattle’s Lumana, whose work focuses in rural Ghana:
Although there is an amazing potential for growth and innovation in cities and urban areas in Africa, I think it is important to recognize that it’s not for everyone. Many people do not have the resources or connections to migrate to cities and some, quite frankly, even when possible, do not want to do so.
Lumana is a small, Seattle-based organization founded by young, multi-national entrepreneurs. In Ghana, Lumana helps people reach their personal and financial goals through microfinance, business education, planning for savings and local mentorship. Lumana also employs four Ghanaians who work in rural areas, out of choice and for connection with their communities.
According to Hoover, these Ghanaians have affinity for their home villages, fellow residents and a slower pace of life. In addition, they take pride in helping to lead operations that can make rural areas more livable.
There is an amazing amount of people who appreciate their traditional way of life and the slower pace that rural life allows. We initially got involved working in rural Africa because its people are some of the most underserved in the world. It is our goal to use our programs to do community economic development that increases opportunities for rural people and makes it easier for them to thrive in the villages they choose to call home.
Lumana's Cole Hoover, in Seattle
Today, microfinance work focuses on cities more often than not, leaving a huge amount of underserved populations in rural Africa, said Samantha Rayner, Executive Director of Lumana. Rural areas experience poverty based on disconnection from services and resources.
“Poverty does not just mean having no money,” Rayner explained. “It means having no opportunities”.
Hoover told the story of “Anna” from the village of Dzita. “Anna” was a case study of Lumana’s accomplishments since 2010, helping rural Africans get limited available resources, including access to basic services, such as health care, drinking water, education and a consistent income.
It was in rural Dzita, not a large city like Accra, that Lumana also helped villagers understand how to make their businesses more profitable and to prepare for unforeseen emergencies by creating specific savings plans for education, future businesses and emergencies.
In addition, in a three-day class, villagers typically learn to better understand supply chains, small and medium-sized businesses and how they influence and affect the total economies of the rural communities.
“Rural Africa is an amazingly beautiful place,” explained Hoover. “You see and feel it in the bright-colored clothing, laid back way of life and support of a close-knit community of hardworking and collectively minded people”
I queried Hoover on the fundamental precepts of urban poverty, something I saw firsthand in several instances overseas, and considered in recent writing about Gary Hustwit’s film, “Urbanized”.
Hoover acknowledged the shared burden of urban and rural poverty. But he cautioned that for many people in Africa, moving to the big city is not the goal:
Rural areas still have many endearing aspects that people are sad to lose when forced to move on when faced with a lack of opportunity. Rural Africans are some of the most amazingly resourceful people on earth. They live with a little, and do a lot. Despite the constant poverty many experience on a daily basis, they learn to get by, supporting themselves and those who they love.
Rayner elaborated on the limits facing older generations in rural areas:
They have been around and have deep roots in these communities, including families, established businesses and homes. However, many times, they struggle to make ends meet, because of the lack of opportunities. We try to help by addressing their limits on accessing capital and teaching better ways to save and make good business decisions with the money they earn. With many of these people, their life is in the rural villages, so we want to help make it easier for them to thrive there.
Based on Lumana’s learning about generational views of the city, the children often do not want to leave their villages. Both Hoover and Raynor contrasted American assumptions about their own “Gen Y”—often labeled as an increasingly urban-oriented cohort.
Rural communities appeal to younger Africans, at a fundamental level, said Rayner:
Many young people are not rushing to the cities because they want to, but because it is their only option. A growing number of young Africans are flooding the big cities in search of jobs, leaving behind a better quality of life at home. Many are there to advance their career, go to university or to make increased amounts of money with opportunities only available in the city so they can remit money back home to their families living in the rural areas.
Based on Lumana’s three years of work in Ghana, young people who move to urban areas often do not get better jobs, a university education or more income for their families back home. Rather, many end up living in worse conditions than circumstances they left, in areas far away from those they hoped to help.
Ironically, concluded Hoover, “many are looking for ways to advance their careers, become educated and then return to the rural communities they love best.”
Sitting with Lumana representatives back home in Seattle, I could only wonder whether recent emphasis on cities risks losing sight of universal principles, easily forgotten in an all too competitive world.
Hoover and Rayner referred me to their lead Ghanaian loan officer, Eric Fiazorli, who spoke of helping the rural poor, his family and community. His closing words need no elaboration:
Working in my community is important and I want to find ways with my life to change the rural places I love so much. I want the future to be better for my family to grow up here.
For more about Lumana, click here, or see this recent video from Seattle’s PBS affiliate:
All photographs composed by the author. The KCTS-9 video is in the public domain.
Just imagine an efficient scene of shuttle transit from a large parking area to your destination, a compact service district. At the end of the shuttle, medical services, a bank, food, drink, entertainment and public restrooms greet your arrival. The spirit of human activity and community are everywhere.
We know these qualities as the ideal characteristics of urban density, of transit-oriented development and of successful, traditional or new “infill” neighborhoods. We also know these qualities as reflective of simple and basic underlying human needs.
And that is exactly the point, as the description above is not of a city, but of the staging and administration area for the obstacle course known as Hell Run, “the most kick-ass mud run on earth”.
Participation in a temporary gathering place, whether it is the staging area for Hell Run, Burning Man or a county fair, remind us of the fundamentals of human settlement, and the framework elements we are trying to recapture in rethinking cities today.
In fact, several authors have addressed the more purposeful creativity of Burning Man, and have debated the urbanistic standing of temporary or nomadic encampments, or, as Nate Berg has noted, city-like places.
I am particularly interested in core services that appear in such places, whether they last for one day or several, and what their inadvertent presentation and implementation tell us about human nature and first principles of association in urban areas. As Aron Chang recently wrote in adapting the work of Ellen Dunham-Jones, Christopher Leinberger and others, embracing traditional human qualities and day-to-day life patterns is essential if historically sprawl-based suburbs are to be successfully reinvented.
For me, the look and feel of the Hell Run staging area was actually a gestalt reminder of more profound, simplifying experiences in Tanzania earlier this year.
There, witnessing daily life was a “back to basics” reorientation which confirmed the underpinnings of cities as conceptualized by the Richard Florida model: places to creatively reinvent human capital from the ground up, taking people’s common and creative potential to higher levels.
I am not arguing event planning as a replacement for urban planning. Rather, I am using visual examples to agree with those who have acknowledged the human aspect of urbanism over top-down prescription or unsustainable patterns of growth.
As illustrated, temporary and less developed places can look eerily similar in the way fundamental human services are congregated and presented to the public, and I would venture that these are the true building blocks of cities everywhere.
It is beyond these building blocks—how our cities and those of the developing world continue to grow, and how growth is administered—where the real challenges continue.
Last March, in a baseline examination of the fundamentals of housing and the wheeled vehicle, I focused on a nagging question brought home from Tanzania and which recurred at the Hell Run staging area: Do we sometimes regulate away the urban vitality of our cities by attempting complex, prescriptive fixes — aimed at modeling or reclaiming what used to evolve naturally — and ironically squelch the first principles of human shelter and transportation suggested above?
Inherited forms of shelter and age-old methods of transportation are to residential zoning and infrastructure planning what oral histories are to Gutenberg — the backdrop of rich tradition for codification and institutional creation. If safety and well-being are maintained, such institutionalization may be laudable for preserving practices or legends otherwise lost with time. However, if the result is lost functionality, needless complexity, discrimination or prohibitive expense, the institution may need reexamination.
For instance, what if a zoning code is no longer cohesive, or impedes rather than accomplishes societal goals?
What if the automobile is overused, at increasing expense, when bicycle, cart, or other transportation would do, with the value added of health and exercise?
Sometimes this contrast of fundamentals to complexity, or of a different place and tradition, can refocus priorities, and warp the senses.
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
Consider Tanzanian roadside stands and the traditional forms of transportation used when a car is either unavailable, inaccessible or inappropriate. Commerce and people can move, without regulation. Wheels and the human body go places in ways we have forgotten. Innovative, human-propelled transport, often with goods attached, knows no bounds.
While not literally Calvino’s cities, images from the developing world, coupled with temporary places such as the Hell Run staging area, “exchange their form”. Together, their initial modesty suggests that through the complex evolution from initially well-meaning institutionalization, we risk losing what is most human about places we live.
So, in building urban community, it remains imperative to reassess—with simplicity in mind—and to always remember first principles, such as shelter and the wheel.
All images composed by the author near Karatu, Tanzania and Carnation, Washington. Click on each image for more detail.
Seattle-based writer and futurist Alex Steffen (left) joins Gary Hustwit on stage
As a survey text in visual form, Gary Hustwit’s Urbanized is a frank introduction to the buzz about cities in our age of right-minded sustainability. Lurking amid the narration and vignettes is a scalable world view where the car is no longer king, and community priorities rather than government mandates often set the agenda for change.
Seattle had the chance to view Hustwit’s new release last night, and in my estimation, the audience saw local issues reflected back from the screen, as will city-dwellers everywhere who attend an Urbanized presentation. Hustwit clearly succeeds in highlighting a universal cast of diverse and sometimes conflicting stakeholders who must balance and integrate ideas, technology and economic forces characteristic of an urbanizing world.
Other articles about Urbanized have set the stage well, among them a Hustwit interview in TheCityFix, a review by Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times (who notes Southern California is missing in Hustwit’s lexicon) and a concise entry by Nate Berg on the new Atlantic Cities site.
In short, Hustwit, while not an architect or urban planner, aptly synthesizes the hottest urban issues—from carbon neutrality to safety to human-scale transportation. He employs voices of the well known, the lesser known, and fast-moving urban imagery, which guides the film from Mumbai to Santiagp, to Brasila, Bogota and around the world.
I’ve written lately about the value of imagery in conveying the messages of cities. In this context, Urbanized gives rich meaning to street scenes, infrastructure, and the single building as part of an urban framework.
Through the film’s masterful editing, reality abounds.
Santiago slum dwellers participate in the design of new dwellings, and choose bathtubs over water heaters to escape the communal shower left behind. Brasilia is a planned joy from the air, yet a disconnected trek for the pedestrian. Beijing, with narration by architect Yung Ho Chang, becomes a city of wide avenues no longer a place where friends cross paths. Adjacent to Cape Town, in the township of Khayelitsha, a community project team builds safety through light and other urban design features.
Hustwit also honors his cast and blends them skillfully with their environments.
Former Bogota Mayor Enrique Peñalosa is one with the bus rapid transit and bicycle infrastructure which made his reputation. Landscape Architect James Corner hears the noises around him on New York’s High Line and acknowledges them as an undeniable piece of the urban experience. And the camera is loyal to the anthropological perspectives presented by Danish urban designer Jan Gehl as he suggests angles of view characteristic of evolved homo sapiens in their urban habitat.
While some have said that Urbanized is more primer than graduate seminar, it is still a must-see as a one-sitting wonder. Seldom do we get to see the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz espouse optimism for cities as opportune laboratories for reinvention and competition, within moments of dramatic scenes of tension between citizens and government. Hustwit has a knack of mixing and matching, and merging problem with opportunity.
A visual triumph, Urbanized could nonetheless feature more cities, reference more history and, sometimes better blend the film’s talking heads with the community they espouse.
Yet the film says more than meets the eye, and in my view, issues an undeniable challenge to all who embrace cities: capture ideas, and make better urban places going forward.
Initial image composed by the author at the Egyptian Theater, Seattle.
Safety, proximity and interaction: the stuff of poetry, metrics or both?
If “cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” as the English poet Rupert Brooke suggests, then how many of us should fear for our safety in the urban darkness? Is a nighttime city better measured by the numbers, rather than by such human perception and poetry?
In my view, first noted here. Brooke’s poetry is a worthy start. His feline analogy creates the framework for five important qualities of 24-hour, magnetic places. The first, safety, spurs four more—mobility, proximity, commerce and interaction.
An ideal night street dining scene would increase city rank
We know the positives from these qualities: legendary, all-night coding jags in the technology sector, vibrant nightlife and night markets, to name a few. All can enable more robust evening public transit service and police presence through a credible political voice lobbying for still more.
While metrics may not be necessary to frame the look and feel of a successful city at night, more formal measures might further structure inspirational images of vibrance over emptiness.
Perhaps it is time for a moniker—-a “lumens score” or “urban illumination index”—to add to the indicators of a 24-hour city, something characteristic of the creative metropolitan meccas called for by the vanguard of today’s urbanist advocates.
I can see the maps, graphs and charts, not to mention the list: “Top Ten Cities to Achieve Brilliance Without Light”.
The relationship between darkness and urbanism has been studied several times in interdisciplinary fashion, and at least one MIT course has been devoted to the “interaction design” of the associated “world of night”. However, my sense is that these efforts remain far more at the cutting edge than they should.
Low interactivity, an incomplete street: a low "lumens score"
In discussion of public safety issues concerning urban areas, law enforcement, design and planning often remain in their respective silos, devoid of integration.
Ongoing neighborhood policing and social service initiatives should be more outrightly integrated with the renewed focus on environmental and urban design criteria for safe streetscapes.
Concepts of “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design” (CPTED)—frequently international in nature—have been present for decades and were implied in Jane Jacobs’ work.
CPTED principles on display in Melbourne
A recent visit to Melbourne, Australia, showed certain CPTED principles along neighborhood streetcar lines, including ample (glare-protective) night-lighting, territorial sensitivities to illuminated, sidewalk-oriented window areas, enhancement of the role of passing vehicles, transparent protection from weather at building entries, and low bushes and/or lower picket-type fencing along the street to limit access while allowing for entry visibility.
Similar safety-enhancement approaches to safety of female transit users have received wide attention. Many cities and civic associations (such as the Downtown Seattle Association) have also advocated for integration of CPTED principles.
Increased advocacy efforts for funding of pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure will accelerate policy and regulation encouraging such principles for safety. This should lead to further discussion opportunities for “complete streets,” which include the dimension of lighting to facilitate wider, multimodal use over a longer percentage of the day.
From the street, hidden possibilities intrigue the imagination amid open and closed businesses, shadows and light.
When evening light and crowds merge to create a sense of safety, where walking and transit define mobility and proximity, if commerce goes on without the sun, then human interaction with the built environment is a demonstrated success.
If we need to energize this after-dark integration by goal setting, for a “lumens score” of 10 out of 10, time is of the essence.
All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.
