Category: infrastructure

uncovering embedded patterns of place in the city

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, placemaking, urban views12 Comments

[showtime]

Amid the roads, sidewalks and places that you have visited before, there are often embedded patterns to uncover, read and reinterpret.

This exploration is an archaeology which involves more than unearthing distinct artifacts from another era.  For me, it includes observing the place-based impacts of four interactive factors:

  • The intersection of the built and natural environments;
  • The evolution of transportation modes;
  • The application of associated land use plans and regulations; and
  • The continuation and/or evolution of surrounding land uses.

Documenting this evidence in your neighborhood is one aspect of “creating the urban diary” that I suggested here and described last month:

[R]ather than merely watching someone else’s video, might you further develop and understand your relationship to place, as well as other similar interactions which you observe?

Personal documentation of the journey from place to space—crossing and intersecting the public and private realms—may be the best way to understand where we live, the choices we make and those that are made for us.

Through such urban diaries, each of us can learn more about cities as they are and could be.

Depicted above and below is an sample urban diary of a Seattle walk from the city’s Madrona neighborhood to Lake Washington and back, across both the public and private domains.

As illustrated here, recreational access to water, motorized, bicycle and pedestrian transportation all take place today within the context of the Olmsted Brothers’ park and boulevard designs of over a century ago. The historic intent and uses of the public and private spaces (largely recreational and residential) continue, while land and water-based transportation modes evolve—and the dynamic City of Bellevue skyline provides a visual offset to the traditional ambiance of Mount Rainier.

An urban diary effort can also uncover longstanding urban gems. In this case, two items provide precedent for the often unfunded aspirations of today’s urbanists for more walkable places and green opportunity.

First, stairways and sidewalks transect public and private greenery (which bear street names that begin far westward in Seattle’s downtown). In addition, the .17 acre “Madrona Briar Patch” provides a parklet with picnic table—an incidental path-adjacent space predating today’s similar “pop-up” city venues.

The bottom line? Based on embedded patterns of place, you can read and document the city around you, and rediscover forgotten opportunities along the way.

For a full screen slideshow, and/or to see more detail, click the slideshow, above, or individual images, below.

All images 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.

corners as the baseline of urbanism

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views23 Comments

The corner is the central place of urban life. More so than public squares—which require a conscious set-aside of assembled space—corners naturally result from crossroads, the elemental feature of travel between places.

Ancient, grid-based Roman military towns, or castra, were planned around crossroads and their corners. The “100 percent corner” is historic shorthand for flagship downtown locations. Decision-making among retailers and residents debate the pros and cons of multi-street exposure to this day.

The corner has been inspiration to authors and poets:

Albert Camus noted the corner as among a city’s most inventive places: “All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door”.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s poetry provided fantastical inspiration: “Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate”.

As illustrated by the exploratory images provided here, corners are by nature interdisciplinary, regardless of cultural surrounding.

At crossroads, whether paved and straight or dirt and ill-defined, destinations meet wheeled and other forms of transport, while natural systems meet reconstructed space. As modes of transportation coalesce, people watch and wait. Often, drainage, power and other utilities focus at such central points, above and below ground. Corners are places of safety and intimidation, homogeneity and contrast.

Given these ironies of focus and ambiguity, corners become opportunities to unify design and land uses. Associated regulatory approaches attempt defensible mixtures of public and private uses at more than the scale of single buildings.

Increasingly popular examples include small commercial entities in traditionally residential zones, residential units located on floors above retail, private uses of otherwise public rights of way and greater human presence in the traditional vehicular domain.

Beyond the wry observation of Camus and the allegory of Tolkien, urban corners may represent the best, most visible and pragmatic opportunity to reorient our cities, and become nothing short of the baseline—the building blocks—for reinvention of city neighborhoods in the new millennium.

All images composed by the author. Click on each image for a larger view.

creating the urban diary

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, urban views22 Comments

A prevalent theme in contemporary urbanist articles and blog posts addresses the enhanced experience of places in cities—whether while walking, biking, or using public transportation. Kasey Klimes’ recent, personal reflections on bicycles as keys to better cities is no exception, and centers on and celebrates this very key point of “experiential understanding.”

The premise is simple: cities are hubs of human interaction, and the urban experience can be enhanced by authentic participation in the dynamics of a place and transitions to nearby venues, including other neighborhoods, or, in certain instances, nearby towns.

With the advent of the internet, this story is told with more than just words.

Websites celebrate the possibilities for narrow streets in Los Angeles, alleys in Seattle, walkability in Dallas, and the legacy of Jane Jacobs’ urban spaces. in particular, small-scale. multimedia producers such as Streetfilms document and celebrate notable examples—usually cities of inspiration from around the world.

Simultaneously, the growing art of urban exploration—infiltrating and documenting cities in new, often controversial ways—offers more “experiential understanding.” However, as recently voiced with some skepticism by Bradley Garrett in Domus, citizen fascination and compilation of urban decay or hidden infrastructure should not be confused with more studied academic documentary efforts.

Rather than simply receive and review such messages (or debate their validity), why not document your own choice of how to live? Why not create your own urban diary?

A pen, keyboard or camera can lead to interaction with surroundings, and avoidance of—no pun intended—a one way street.

Here are five suggestions for framing your surroundings:

  • On your next walk from where you live to a destination of choice, summarize the experience in one paragraph.
  • Take five photos of your favorite neighborhood locations.
  • Think about somewhere you wish was closer to where you live.  Pick an ideal location, and write about, or photograph how you would travel from here to there.
  • Videotape a walk, bike ride or roadside activity along a street.
  • Using burst or continuous mode on a camera, photograph street life that you observe from a passenger window.

Do these suggestions sound like forced immersion, or an invasion into the public spaces around you? 

Or, rather than merely watching someone else’s video, might you further develop and understand your relationship to place, as well as other similar interactions which you observe?

Personal documentation of the journey from place to space—crossing and intersecting the public and private realms—may be the best way to understand where we live, the choices we make and those that are made for us.

Through such urban diaries, each of us can learn more about cities as they are and could be.

All images composed by the author.

Obama and the Middle East, urban sustainability and detente

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, housing, infrastructure, Israel, myurbanist international, placemaking, politics, sustainability, transit oriented development, urban administration, urban views2 Comments

Could sustainability principles pave the path to peace?

President Obama’s strategic statements about the Middle East last Thursday (and as clarified to AIPAC on Sunday) were not city-specific, but took me back one year to Jerusalem and in-person perspectives on the city’s prospects.

My 2010 reflections, reproduced below, capture individuals still in the news, and the issues of today’s urbanism, boundaries and ecosystems in Jerusalem—considerations well worth heeding in response to the President’s focus on borders, and his call to embrace the choice “between the shackles of the past and the promises of the future.”

In Jerusalem, a municipal administration rides a pendulum between sustainability and geopolitics.

Greenbelts, light rail, complete street-making, and the storied demolition orders for Palestinian homes in a floodway: all live on a world stage.

Last week, addressing Pacific Northwest professionals visiting with Seattle-based i-SUSTAIN, Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur prescribed the ultimate sustainable urbanism, drawing from a Hebrew phrase. Jerusalem must “emerge from its [many] walls,” old and new, she argued, and enhance the city’s diverse, public areas largely already shared by all.

The Jerusalem of gathering spaces and neighborhoods is already present, she claimed, and should no longer grow out in rings of settlements, but should preserve compact neighborhoods based on affinity, interlinked by public transit and defining connectors such as the Jaffa Road and the Street of the Prophets.

The tools? Public process, for one, even in areas annexed after the 1967 Six-Day War, to help define a collective local voice.

Her systemic analysis of the city is familiar and compelling, as she simultaneously seeks to avoid a Nicosia outcome (a reference to the divided Cyprus to the northwest). Arguably, she is peacemaking on a platform of the sustainable city.

For instance, Tsur thinks at night about the infrastructure lacking in East Jerusalem, and how the city should rise above the intractable and remedy untreated eastern watershed drainage, which flows directly to the Dead Sea. It would be feasible, she says, to pump this sewage to the state-of-the-art treatment plant that already treats the western watershed sewage, and create drinking water through sustainable technology.

Meanwhile, in the East Jerusalem village of Silwan, along the Kidron Valley, just below the City of David and Hezekiah’s water tunnel, Fakhri Abu Diab thinks at night about other things — like what to tell his children about the potential fate of the family house which still “carries the smell of his mother.” As recently reported by The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner, the Abu Diab house was one of several that received a demolition order, because it was expanded without a permit and is the potential location of an archaeological park at the base of excavations already mired in the complexities of political archeology — a search not only to document biblical events, but seen by detractors as a Jewish land-claim process in disguise.

In Abu Diab’s view, the post-1967 municipality has ignored him before, and he lacks confidence in the proposed relocation offer, which is under negotiation for a move to higher ground.

Walls, sleepless nights, conflict, water, and a future for children. The human condition speaks loudly in this most urban of cities, as the debate over the future of Jerusalem brings a reality-television aura to local land-use administration.

The original article also appeared in Crosscut, here.