In Madrid, Seattle and Tel Aviv, here are three examples where the people are as constructed as the buildings they adorn.
All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail. © 2009-2013 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
Here is one more of my eleven favorite night city photographs from 2011 and 2012 that will hang for the month of February at Cafe Verite’s Madrona location in Seattle. An earlier post summarizes my theme, which focuses on “meetings” of light, people and the built environment.
Three of the photographs will also appear in my upcoming book, Urbanism Without Effort, (Island Press, 2013). One is the likely cover photo.
For Seattle locals (or if you will be visiting), stay tuned for notice of a small gathering during the month. Mini-cupcakes will add to the ambience my several snapshots of the 24 hour city.
All images composed by the author in Vancouver, British Columbia. Click on image for more detail. © 2009-2013 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
I find that often, an excess of verbiage in a blog post detracts from an urban image. In cases where a natural setting blends with the built environment, the best summation is within the reader’s review and contemplation.
So, I will offer just one observation: Even without a devastating storm, our structures are easily overshadowed by daily expressions of climate nearby.
Image composed by the author. Click on image for more detail. © 2009-2013 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
Welcome to a new orientation towards city ruins—where Photoshop and urbanism have something in common—as shown in the accompanying image of the archaeological site of Pompeii.
First, the original photograph blends with four Photoshop “adjustment layers”, including monochrome and sepia versions of a formerly all-color background.
Second, as a result, modern visitors show a more contrasting, layered hue against an excavated Roman street scene, over 2000 years after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
Ironically, the Photoshop and urbanist layering combine to suggest a pedestrian-oriented, narrower right of way, often championed today, centuries after Pompeii’s demise.
Amid the partially restored grid of a celebrated ruin, the human scale transcends time. Ancient and modern intermingle in a way that words alone cannot describe.
Image composed and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop (Version CS5) by the author. To further explore Pompeii by Google Street View, click here.
The last week of the year is typically reserved for retrospective, and “best of” assessments. Yet, it can also be a time of hope, resolution, and prediction—an interlude of oracles and dreams.
Picture this about 2012—an urbanist calendar with places in mind—framed by international snapshots in time.
Each month of this urbanist calendar could echo experience, and provoke optimism through depiction of people and place.
Here is my composition, and perspective, from Seattle and beyond.
All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.
From time to time, a single image captures the look and feel of city life, and successfully depicts an urban place where people come together.
This morning, I had the opportunity on the “Place Matters” radio show to explain the role of photography in placemaking, as a tool to better define the personal, contextual experience of a neighborhood or city venue.
The interior scenes of “the three B’s”—barbershops, bars and billiards—often mean as much as the magic of street and square when portraying the personal interactions of cities, towns and neighborhood.
To me, this proposition demands an example, and the photo above portrays such an interior space within a dense urban neighborhood after midnight.
As I wrote last summer about the closures of Borders bookstores, such imagery says more than is apparent at first glance about how local, sustainable “third places” foster the spirit of human collaboration.
Photograph composed by the author.
Last year, I asked what elements of today’s urban landscape occur in spite of urban land use policy and regulation, and form “shapes of avoidance”. I provided a historical example, and suggested modern counterparts. That was before Occupy Wall Street and its progeny.
Nate Berg’s November 22 article in The Atlantic Cities posed compelling questions about how today’s public spaces can accommodate the Occupy Movement.
Berg asked whether the Movement “may be a mechanism to change the way we think about what we as a public want and need from our public spaces”.
In visiting the public spaces used by Occupy Seattle and Occupy DC in the past weeks, I saw a potentially new form of public space, institutionalized, not by top-down authority, but in spite of it.
Accordingly, Berg’s question recalled my thoughts from November, 2010, slightly amended from the original, below.
______
The form of urban settlements and appearance of constituent structures reflect underlying culture and regulation.
In times of change, buildings, landscapes and objects transform to show the impact of new or modified policies or regulations. And the resulting shapes of compliance—such as the patterns of height, bulk and density dictated by a new downtown zoning code—can potentially reinvent the urban landscape.
But the urban landscape can also be dramatically altered by “shapes of avoidance”.
Consider, in the context of everyday urbanism, those shapes and patterns dictated by focused avoidance of regulation.
Here, I am discussing not just spontaneous parklets and sidewalk tables of guerrilla urbanism” or “pop-up” cities, but widespread examples of urban forms that result when policy or regulation is creatively defied.
Call it the urban landscape’s manifestation of French-American microbiologist René Dubos‘ classic discourses on remarkable and unpredictable human adaptation to environmental change, Man Adapting and So Human an Animal.
A compelling example is the alteration of a southern Italian landscape in the 15th to 17th centuries premised on the avoidance of taxes or fees—the apparent explanation for the unique shape of trulli houses in Puglia, Italy—and the resulting appearance of the Itria Valley and the town of Alberobello.
As the story goes, local inhabitants built the conical houses—that don’t look like houses—without mortar. This method allowed easy destruction, so the Counts of Conversano could avoid property tax payments to the King of Naples on permanent structures (such as residences).
What are today’s trulli?
Are they merely a list of unenforced zoning violations (e.g. unpermitted home occupations, illegal accessory dwellings, unsanctioned tent cities, vehicles on lawns) or perpetual temporary uses?
Given the breadth of land use regulation today, could spontaneous, repetitive trulli-like “shapes of avoidance” define a sustainable urban landscape more interesting than planned examples?
Or are the most visible “shapes of avoidance” now limited to freedom of expression in the ballot box and on urban walls?
After all, some might argue that graffiti and the recent electoral landscape are the trulli of our times.
All images composed by the author.
This article was republished in similar form in the Fall 2011 issue of ARCADE, Architecture and Design in the Northwest.
huffington post: charles r. wolfe crosscut.com: chuck wolfe seattlepi.com: chuck wolfe planetizen sustainable cities collective Kaid Benfield (Kaid at NRDC) urban point of view© 2009-2013 myurbanist All Rights Reserved
urbanists at work
