On Saturday, September 13, the 2014 multi-day (and always provocative) Seattle Design Festival features a “Public Space in Motion” panel.
Here, almost live from France, is the panel’s opening presentation:
Category: infrastructure
timeless or time-bound in the city?
Take away context clues, and cities become more interesting matrices—with blank cells to complete—where each of us personalizes how space meets time.
A uniform filter applied to multiple urban scenes can easily warp time and location, and obscure—yet somehow enhance—the reality of place.
This simple premise informs our point of view about city life. For every image, topic or discipline, our values and belief systems inform what we see, especially when familiar guideposts get filtered away.
Remove color, crop, leave only hint and nuance, and the city can become an off-trail place where inquiry is a form of intellectual rescue and rediscovery.
In the ten examples below, five questions set the tone for this rediscovery process:
- Is it apparent when the photo occured?
- Is the location clear? If so, is such clarity based on personal familiarity with the location?
- Is the context of the scene readily understandable? What more would be needed to offer a more complete answer to questions of when and where?
- Which element of urban life seems the most important to the composition (e.g. safety, environment, mode of transportation, role of public space, public/private interface)?
- What questions remain?
The answers are for each of us to develop and consider, but one message stands out. Take apart the most fundamental things we see everyday. Inquire, and on the rebound, literally and figuratively, each of us will see things in a whole new light.
An interesting footnote: I captured all photos above between 2010 and 2014, on four different continents. During test runs on Facebook, several people commented that most of the photos looked dated, and many did not believe that I was the photographer, nor Lightroom the robber of color.
Perhaps ironically, the city featured the most (Seattle), is barely 160 years old. The second-to-last photo (Jerusalem) belies simultaneous claims of place dating back thousands of years. Yet the antique filter creates equal partners in the rediscovery process.
The other photos show, inter alia, how a shopping gallery floor (Sydney) still projects a historic building’s nineteenth century pattern, how London streets and former Lisbon fairgrounds are both fair game for blended bicycle traffic, and how a classic older car (Minneapolis) can cast a retro-era feel on an entire intersection.
Images composed by the author in London, Jerusalem, Lisbon, Minneapolis, Seattle and Sydney. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.
why do we write about cities?
When we write about cities, sometimes we do best when we take the metrics away.
In 2011, amid a visit to San Francisco and just back from Africa, I offered some thoughts about why we write about cities. Three years later, I’m not sure much has changed.
I continue to believe that visiting and photographing cities worldwide can take the metrics away, often amid economic boom, or bust, next to revolution or facing or remembering the challenge of reconstruction. In such settings, qualitative and interactive experiences and comparison seem more important than documenting carbon emissions, census data, rankings or ratings.
While data and catch-phrases have merit to enhance background principles and to support goals, so does the sense of wonder with which people explain where they live, and ask about how other places are different, day-to-day, at the human scale.
Witness the frustrated commuter, who will authentically share perceptions, no matter the transportation mode. People will earnestly talk about neighborhood safety, a sense of economic well-being or challenge and satisfaction or concerns about a child’s education. With sincerity, others will refer to the weather, green or water surroundings or the music of place and time.
And transfixed, the world listens to and watches revolutions and disaster, where the urban setting is entirely disoriented and must rebuild again.
The fundamental reason that successful cities resonate is because they satisfy and/or complement some very basic human needs, often related to mental and physical health: congregation, safety, and the three “e’s” of education, environment and economy. In our policy and regulatory discussion of such urban settings, I continue to think we might perform at a higher level by starting with reminders of the core: the basic human needs which cities can give, or frustrate.
Only after acknowledging the fundamentals—and pausing to watch and listen— should we debate the circular arguments of ends versus means.
Images composed by the author in San Francisco and Seattle in 2011 and 2014. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.
capturing underlying patterns of urban street design
Have you ever wondered why some places seem built for automobiles as opposed to humans?
In a recent study, J. Alexander Maxwell and fellow researchers from the University of Strathclyde’s Urban Design Studies Unit found evidence that before the rise of the automobile, cities developed on a walkable “human” scale, with main streets that rarely exceeded 400 meters (a little more than 437 yards).
I recently joined Mr. Maxwell as co-author of an article in the London School of Economics and Political Science American Politics and Policy Blog. Together, we argue that this uniformity reveals an underlying pattern to pedestrian city settings, which merits renewed attention in contemporary urban design and policies.
Read our article here.
Image composed by the author in Aix-en-Provence, France. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
choosing place-receiving over placemaking, and why
A footnote to the new series, in the urban world, juxtapositions matter
In 1997, I returned to Europe after a long absence. My Paris photograph, above, jump-started a then-dormant fascination with the scenery of urban life and form.
I later digitized the photograph, to enhance internal contrasts between the Eiffel Tower, the layered scene on the Pont d’léna and the Champs de Mars beyond. My goal? An indelible impression, evoking a provocative, dream-like quality, consistent with a profound place-based memory.
Call this informal process “place-receiving”, and not placemaking.
Is place-receiving composed of unique occurrences, limited only to when and where we, the users, find them? Can they be replicated? If so, how?
These questions raise a practical side—and a real challenge—in assuring that placemaking efforts dovetail with the human nature of place-receiving described here.
The challenge comes from today’s renewed interest in creating special urban places for people—whether public, private or somewhere between—often offered by design professionals or related consultants.
Sometimes, the look and feel of a remade urban place is not consistent with the human perceptions common to place receiving. A quick example from my hometown: Assertions that downtown redevelopment approaches and several features of the Seattle waterfront plan just don’t fit the context of local climate, local history and likely end users.
Sixteen years later, disassembling the Paris photograph, I see many central elements of what urban visitors, residents and design professionals aspire to, whether resulting from spontaneity, casual tactics, or more purposeful plans. The photograph suggests several words well within the vocabularies of placemaking, complete streets, green infrastructure or human-scale approaches.
Some summaries of these elements seem stale and full of labels. Others evoke emotion through climate, color and the built environment. Here are just five examples:
- The pavement dramatically mirrors people approaching the Eiffel Tower on the Pont d’léna.
- The Eiffel Tower, the Pont d’léna, an equestrian statue, cars, buses and people combine to enhance a Paris view and experience.
- The grainy textures of infrastructure stand out along the Seine.
- Water and pavement blend in Paris.
- A red bus and red backpack stand out against the Pont d’léna, the base of the Eiffel Tower and the expanse of the Champs de Mars.
Other summaries could be more poetic, or more human in focus. And perhaps they should, because place and place-receiving occur as much in our minds as in the real world.
My take? In the end, we should focus more on place-receivers as the most authentic stakeholders of meaning in the urban experience. If people cannot place-receive with a sense of acceptance and inspiration, placemaking may mean very little indeed.
Image composed by the author in Paris in December, 1997. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2014 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city,see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.