Category: infrastructure

finding the best ways to portray city life

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking12 Comments

Media attention to urban life continues, day by day, but to my mind, characteristic rankings, photographs and metrics often need greater historical context, and more robust, real-life punctuation.

While Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement parlay the daily urban tensions of democracy and authority, cities remain focal points of celebration, as demonstrated in Robert Kunzig’s latest city-as-solution retrospective and accompanying imagery in the December 2011 National Geographic.

Kunzig’s article is, in fact, closer to the holistic focus called for above. By using Ebenezer Howard’s “large and lingering impact” as a foil, Kunzig contrasts the zeal of economist Edward Glaeser, the perspectives of David Owen, as well as a mini-history of sprawl and South Korean density. His approach recalls journalist-turned-urban authority Grady Clay’s treatment of Howard’s Garden City ideals (and largely misplaced American implementation) in a famous 1959 Horizon Magazine article, “Metropolis Regained”.

Two years ago, while granting Clay its Athena Award, the Congress for the New Urbanism brought renewed attention to Clay’s article—as early documentation of back to the city principles.

Clay’s 1959 conclusion still holds:

All these ideas of the New Urbanists spring from their conviction that the city can be saved, but not by denying its nature. The city, they believe, generates innumerable devices for ameliorating the human lot, and we would do well to study these—even where at first glance they look disorderly and disreputable—before abandoning them. Cities have been around too long for our generation to desert them so precipitously. As that admirable humanist Leon Battista Alberti put it in his Deiciarchia, “The necessary things are those without which you cannot well pursue life. And as we see, man, from his emergence into this light to his last end, has always found it necessary to turn to others for help. But then cities were created for no other reason than for men to live together in comfort and contentment.”

Kudos to Kunzig for his artful use of Howard’s life-long quest for a livable urbanism; especially in the context of my memories of Clay’s writings.

But the Kunzig article invites more.

Like Clay’s observations in his later writings (e.g., the “Vantages” chapter in Close Up: How to Read the American City), in the last few months, I have pondered how best to further communicate urban preferences amid a changing landscape. As shown by both Kunzig and Clay, history can supplement two forms of documentation: straightforward photography with authentic, and ordinary personal experience.

To put this into practice, why not develop a simple test to measure a city (over and above complex rankings or metrics) that takes advantage of history, imagery and experience, including daily life? I offer, in short form, an emphasis on a creative reference, an icon and the hope to stay, as follows, and invite others to offer their own criteria.

The value of a creative reference. The founding story of a city is often an influential basis for prominence and evolution. The most famous founding stories derive from creation myths, such as that of Rome. Romulus and Remus, fathered by Mars, the God of War, abandoned at birth on the Tiber River by a threatened king, rescued by a wolf, and raised by shepherds—Romulus becomes ruler after prevailing in the “duel of the titans”.

In my measure, good lore is essential to a successful city.

The helpful role of a visible icon. Among the most photographed and touted elements of a city is a central place or object that can become a focal point for distinction and pride. Once religious or military in nature, modern cities display several exemplary civic monuments or places for ready reference of implied success.

Perhaps the most famous is the Eiffel Tower, which acts as a symbol of Paris in the opening photograph, above.

Most particularly, a compilation of completed statements about “why I hope to stay” can offer qualitative input on livability. For example: “I hope to keep living here because I feel like I can walk safely to where I need to go.”

These answers would not be uniform—some may champion transit, bicycles, parks and open space, good schools or night life—but the “why” question probes at the “comfort and contentment” referenced by Clay in “Metropolis Regained”, or Kunzig’s conclusion.

After saying goodbye to his interviewee, British planning academic Peter Hall, Kunzig explains:

With that he disappeared into the Underground for his ride home, leaving me on the crowded sidewalk with a great gift: a few hours to kill in London. Even Ebenezer Howard would have understood the feeling, at least as a young man. When he returned after a few years in the U.S.—he’d flopped as a homesteading farmer in Nebraska—he was jazzed by his native city. Just riding an omnibus, he later wrote, gave him a pleasantly visceral jolt: “A strange ecstatic feeling at such times often possessed me … The crowded streets—the signs of wealth and prosperity—the bustle—the very confusion and disorder appealed to me, and I was filled with delight.”

The key point: Kunzig, in National Geographic shows how as popular writing on urban topics matures, we move closer to meaningful issue statements about urban life. A narrative once the province of “specialists”, such as Clay, is now mainstream.

But with just a few more questions and answers of the sort proposed here, removed observation is more likely to result in practical understanding of urban solutions and success.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for more detail.

visual adventures of the urban bicycle

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, placemaking, sustainability, urban views4 Comments

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.

Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry on Sustainable Cities Collective. For the remainder, click here.

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.

remembering urban growth, from idea to implementation

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, housing, infrastructure, placemaking, politics2 Comments

For many of today’s advocates of creative cities, success cannot be achieved soon enough. Common aspirations of sprawl avoidance, compact development, dynamic public spaces, ecosystem integration and multimodal transit are increasingly touted in both the public and private sectors.

Organizations such as the Urban Land Institute (ULI) provide associated, implementation-oriented goals through mission statements. ULI’s mission, in part, prioritizes the responsible use of land and creating and sustaining thriving communities.

In reality, much time often passes between aspiration, mission statement and common acceptance and/or implementation. Good ideas evolve and often merge along the way. And always, land use planning and regulation are impacted by fundamental principles of safety, jobs, education and the politics of place.

Today’s city-oriented visions are often traced to an urban livability and walkability perspective, with Jane Jacobs as the most touted precursor. Historic suburban development patterns are usually the villains of the story. But even those historically vested in suburban single family home ownership suggested reform in land development practices earlier than we often remember.

These calls for reexamination were notable—not for any urgency placed on abandonment of the car—but for a mid-course, suburban damage control assessment based on many ideas that retain currency today.

About the same time as the publication of Jacobs’ comprehensive, classic article in Fortune Magazine, “Downtown is for People”, a 1959 video entitled “Community Growth, Crisis and Challenge” shared several nascent ideas for innovation in land development and regulation.

This video project of the National Association of Homebuilders (in cooperation with ULI and the American Institute of Architects and the predecessor to the American Planning Association), presented an in-process critique of sprawl, long commutes and increasing land costs, and suggested research and implementation of a regionally-based rethinking of development patterns, with urban planning as a necessary intervenor.

Ironically, Rick Harrison’s 2010 newgeography article examined the video’s message, found it largely unheeded and questioned whether sole reliance on transit-oriented density as the only definition of the sustainable city going forward.

For perspective, I suggest a read of Jacobs’ article, linked above, and a view of the video, embedded below. Both offer then-emergent best practices as a basis for much of today’s critical thinking:

From the video, note the inherent, still prevalent themes and challenges of American land development, including:

  • An outright concern with land affordability and the importance of a mixture of housing types
  • Commentary addressing the notable absence of regional planning
  • Attention to the defensive use of zoning regulations rather than working more creative development incentives
  • The challenges of funding infrastructure for new development
  • The impact of sprawl, on land, resources and accessibility
  • Appropriate separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic
  • Rethinking streets (although still with a presumption that creative cul-de-sacs and curvilinear patterns might trump the grid)
  • An orientation towards designing with the land
  • The potential of cluster and compact development
  • The challenges facing the creative innovator

Clearly, the video is dated, particularly in the seeming assumptions that suburbs and not repopulated cities will be the only harbingers of future growth. It remained for Jacobs and her followers to speak to the best ways to approach the redevelopment of urban cores.

However, there is a not-so-hidden revelation in both pieces: 52 years ago, today’s issues were increasingly clear, and many solutions were already forecast or known.

Successful implementation warrants mention, and many current sources of information regularly celebrate city and neighborhood achievements, through new projects, purposeful reinvention or spontaneous solutions. Examples include longstanding, “best practice” aggregators such as Planetizen, the newer Sustainable Cities Collective, as well as TheAtlantic.com‘s new sister website, The Atlantic Cities.

Such celebration is appropriate, to chronicle how today’s mission statements continue to influence urban development at a time when how we live, work and travel is undeniably changing.

But looking back and reflecting fuels a new question: What will the pundits of 2063 say about the evolution and merger of our ideas of today?

Image composed by the author. Video reproduced subject to a public domain creative commons license.

how city gates define urban space

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, placemaking, urban administration4 Comments
The city gate of old: form follows function

In a time of urbanization, “arrival cities” and metropolitan regions with multiple urban centers, should a city provide an entry differentiating itself from its barrios, suburbs and exurbs?

Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry on Sustainable Cities Collective. For the remainder, click here.

how temporary and simple places can define city life

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, placemaking, sustainability12 Comments

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.

In the words of the postwar Italian writer and Invisible Cities author, Italo Calvino:

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.