Rich city texture (complete with pedestrian and transit opportunities and magnetic color) is another feature of high urbandwidth. Below, renderings of Nice, France display the remade city center focused around the Nice Tramway, which I described in seattlepi.com (click here) last year.
Street performance in a public space is one feature of high urbandwidth.
Here, we return to Seattle’s Occidental Park, (also featured here and, by Dan Bertolet, here), to walk with A.K. “Mimi” Allin, for a strolling read of a complex novel, merged with the notion of enhanced mutual ownership of public space.
Click here to read more about Allin and 4Culture’s site-specific performance exhibit, “Walking in War in Peace”.
The recalibration of urbandwidth in a suburban, outdoor mall:
Writing and conversing about the urban experience has made one thing clear. Short of the word “urbanism” and its modified variants, there is no one English word which holistically captures the qualities of livable cites or the associated metrics that many commentators tout and exemplify.
Portland’s Jason King supports this point in his wonderful article,”[Fill in the Blank] Urbanism,” which I noted in March. King’s article profiled the range of paired terms which modify the basic urbanism premise–and asked readers to name a favorite.
Others have described the inadequacy of commonly used catchwords. Writing in the Washington Post, on May 8, architect Roger Lewis called for terms far more descriptive than “transit-oriented development” (TOD) to describe the qualities of walkable cities, calling for “multimodal TOD’s”.
Similarly, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab Director, Liz Dunn, working with Walk Score’s Matt Lerner, have advocated for a Jane Jacobs-based comprehensive metric, the Jane Score, to more completely measure urban diversity and “granularity” and supplement the increasingly recognized Walk Score tool.
With such ever-expanding and thoughtful efforts to diversify the measures applicable to a renewed, compact, walkable, and multimodal urban fabric, it would help to have one word to describe the phenomenon.
I suggest that we are talking about recalibrating urbandwidth around the world.
(This article appears in slightly different form in seattlepi.com on July 21, here. Thanks also to Planetizen for incorporating the original form of this article under the headline “For Lack of a Better Term,” here.)
In the ideal urban setting, waterside venues are optimal places of human interaction, and are often destinations on longer treks across neighborhoods which Alex Steffen terms “deep walkability”.
Such venues are also symbolic of the politics of placemaking: who gets and who pays amid the unfolding challenge of how to fund and maintain?
The renderings of France and the United States below suggest five elements of the “walkable waterside” within the context of sustainable urban experiences–as presumed characteristics of smart growth and consistent with the touted norms of today’s walkable urbanism.
These modified photos add to prior myurbanist renderings here and here, which visualize the contemporary dialogue about multimodal urban experience, and aim to enhance our sense of the possible.
The displayed examples share at least the following elements:
1. Walking places.
2. Biking places, with enabled separation from other transportation modes.
2. Places of congregation, recreation and observation.
3. Intermingling of water-dependent trades.
4; Food along the way.
5. Natural settings blended with the urban fabric.
Even with the prospect of stimulus-era federal assistance, cash-strapped cities in challenging economic times often lack necessary resources to implement, maintain and sustain these elements of successful places. The legitimate budgetary needs of other, complementary urban needs, such as human service, public safety and infrastructure maintenance and improvements compete for the public dollars which result from taxes, bond issues and the traditional suite of urban revenue generation.
As a result, without more, the places we want may lose a competition for scarce resources in the world of local public finance.
Accordingly, what is the supplementary private role in public placemaking? Can we further innovate legally permissible public-private partnerships to assure the bright colors of rendered community?
In this case, perhaps compelling imagery of human interaction can beget further innovation.
