Category: infill development

fusion businesses and the cities of tomorrow

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, placemaking, urban views21 Comments

When a small branch of a local ice cream business opened within the laundromat up the street, it was evidence that today’s land use regulations are becoming more in sync with changing urban reality.

Recently, I have been focusing on the potential artifacts of urban life in cities as they grow more dense. Last week, I asked about the fate of the front lawn.

Today, in the spirit of the ice cream laundry, I’m switching from what we may lose to what we may gain: the looming fusion businesses of tomorrow.

For instance, what is the fate of technology of convenience such as individual washers and dryers? In what central places can we share, combine and “fuse” their use?

My neighborhood is not alone. Consider Copenhagen’s celebrated Laundromat Cafe, which has fused more than ice cream with laundry, and inspired a trend. Note also some American spin-and-dine examples, such as San Francisco’s Brain Wash.

In order to enable fusion businesses, land use regulations may need more flexibility. In this case, conventional zoning often segregated food service uses from more “industrial” uses such as laundries. In addition. smaller start-ups may have been prohibited within existing uses, with walk-up service limited in scope.

Reform efforts can and should reinvent such conventional impediments to the more efficient, compact city life, and allow the flexibility of innovation and redefined urban traditions. As currently proposed Seattle efforts illustrate, reforms aimed at more livable places can be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and can enable more employment closer to home.

Beyond regulatory reform, in today’s sustainable city, it’s good to foster shared consumption lifestyles and functional, multi-purpose venues, whether fad, fancy or emerging reality.

Want to track shared consumption examples and the fusion dynamic? I highly recommend shareable.net for a one-stop check on the latest on bike-sharing, car-sharing and prognostication on the next sustainable recombination of the way we live.

Image composed by the author.

pondering artifacts of displacement in the sustainable city

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, placemaking, sustainability6 Comments
What happens when the bicycles beat the big box?

Last week, George Monbiot of The Guardian sounded the urbanist alarm.

The cause? In order to offset strains on infrastructure, an Australian provincial initiative is offering stipends to Sydney residents who leave town.

Monbiot’s response included a headline which was nothing short of an international clarion renouncing this short-term fix. “Sustainable cities must be compact and high-density,” he said, while arguing for strong planning laws to stay the course.

Monbiot joins a legion of many who embrace the thesis of David Owen’s New York City-based “Green Metropolis“— and aptly suggest that the compact, less auto-dependent city is our necessary, sustainable future.

Monbiot’s tout towards planning is appropriate, but just what does it mean? For one thing, we must ponder the impacts of displacement, because there may no longer be enough room for life—or death—as we know it.

If our cities are to become more dense, what will become of uses and properties which do not present optimal uses of urban land? As the disfavored car dealerships, warehouses and low-rise strip malls reconfigure and yield to more concentrated uses, policymakers should be forward thinking in their prescriptions for the changing city.

Will some positive or necessary, low density urban traditions also be dispossessed? Where will they go in a gradually reshaped, sprawl-free urban system?

My choice of Latin words above— “clarion,” “legion” and “thesis”— are not accidental. In classical precedent, there are thought-provoking lessons, still visible at will.

Consider Rome, and learning from the landscape of an iconic walk in the Appia Antica Park on its outskirts.

Opened in 312 B.C., the Via Appia (the “queen of the long roads” of ancient military transport and commerce) traversed ancient Italy from Rome to the Adriatic port of Brindisi.

All along the walk today, over original paving stones, ruins flank the roadway—remnants of burial monuments, statues, tombs and towers.

Sometime after 200 A.D., burials were banned in the city, because of crowding and land values. Catacombs on the periphery offered mass internments to the growing religious population. Along the main thoroughfares, further beyond the city walls, the wealthy adorned the roadsides with personal and family tributes— now an outdoor museum of bygone sprawl.

In ancient Rome, density drove out the dead, and changed the landscape in unanticipated ways, still visible today. It’s a legacy worth noting after two thousand years.

If our cities must be dense to be competitive and sustainable, we must also look with care to the potential displacement of uses, institutions or traditions—not to mention the artifacts we will leave behind.

All images composed by the author.

exploring the immediacy of the in-between place

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, multimedia, placemaking, urban abstractions, urban views2 Comments

The archaeology of today’s urban regions need not be excavation-based. One trick allows the illusion of memory through photographic tools.

Here are three photographs taken just yesterday, at an under-leased, small suburban mall awaiting reinvention. A mixed use redevelopment lost momentum with the recession, and what is left is an in-between place.

In this venue, imagery of the in-between collapses time, and enhances empty—and lonely—spaces, suggesting ghosts of strollers and shoppers from not so long ago.

I suggest that local photographs can accentuate, in your midst, an Ostia Antica—the ruins of the abandoned seaport of ancient Rome—now isolated from the sea.

This is important, because accelerating history through imagery can add to our sense of immediacy, in search of the best ways to reinvent the urban, suburban and exurban environments around us.

All images composed by the author.

Portland: framing the question of place

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, transit oriented development, urban views14 Comments

Visits to other cities can easily create “grass is always greener responses” which are hardly complete analyses of a place and its problems.

Yet these human, spontaneous gestalts are worth noting, because they say something about the immediate look and feel of location, and can constitute authentic perceptions of the best of urbanism.

My role in Portland, Oregon last Friday was to present the results of my recent, co-authored study on transit-oriented and urban center development to a meeting of the American Bar Association’s State and Local Government Law Section—and then to co-lead a bus tour on specific, local examples—from the Lloyd District to the Pearl District and beyond.

In keeping with the spirit of gestalt, something very human happened along the way.

For the past few years, Portland has inspired urbanist writers because of an advanced transportation system (including light rail, streetcar and bicycle), a highly walkable downtown, and development practices which have captured the imagination of a new generation of city-oriented populists.

In particular, two of the best urbanist articles about Portland, William Fulton’s summary of why Portland works and Dan Bertolet’s comparison with Seattle, led me to my own gloss.

From a fundamental, “read the city” perspective, downtown Portland and its close-in neighborhoods capture the best of an urban experience. The scale, street surfaces and sidewalk furnishings occur amid integrated, yet appropriately separated transportation modes and supportive green spaces. Innovative business and community groups have leveraged proximity to transit and managed parking through successful development strategies.

All lead to irresistible memories of examples from elsewhere and a universal question:

How can we capture this experience in my city?

Perhaps such a fundamental human response is the best metric of all, and the key to achieving a livable place.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail. Cross-posted in The Huffington Post and Sustainable Cities Collective.

the soul never thinks without a picture of a city

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, sustainability, urban views5 Comments

Aristotle said that a soul never thinks without a picture.

He must have meant a picture of a city, because, in humanistic response to today’s pragmatic world of policy, regulation and urbanist proclamations, I often remember an August 12, 2006 photograph taken with a Nikon D-200 traded away long ago.

The camera is gone, but the image of Spinola Bay, St. Julian’s, Malta lives on, even as filtered and set to music here last July.

The reason is simple.  The photograph suggests straightforward and ideal balances as follows:

  • A balance of color, of dark and light;
  • A balance of people, of land, water and sky;
  • A balance of automobile, boat and pedestrian commingling and observing;
  • A balance of residence, employment and compactness that seems not only to work, but to extol like a poster the virtues of urban life;
  • And, finally, a balance that much of today’s contemporary urban examination and discussions prescribe anew.

In a portrait of a former small fishing village, and now a literal reflection of dwellings, shops and restaurants in an island country, there is buried not only a treatise, but a novel and a fantastical place to dream.