Given the right context, the simplest urban intervention enlivens public space, reaps enormous value, and fosters fundamental human expression and curiosity.
In recent years, American cities have seen a rebirth of several such street level activities, ranging from small “parklets” to food trucks. The public piano trend is among the latest–and to my mind the most successful—of the many pop-up catalysts now popular in small city spaces. Notably, one website inventories the appearance of street pianos around the world.
This summer, Vancouver’s CityStudio is bringing the False Creek seawall to life next to the Olympic Village, as part of the Keys to the Streets Project. The piano shown above complements a pedestrian and bike environment–with little effort and much reward.
Last month, to the south, a government-appointed Seattle task force alone recommended 37 different tools (PDF) for enhancing public space management.
The Seattle list reads like an inventory of items garnered from the urbanist blogosphere, e.g. sidewalk cafes, wayfinding signs and pole banners. Yet public pianos do not specifically appear in the Seattle accounting.
However, as the photo above clearly shows, with first inspiration from New York, Portland, Miami, and elsewhere around the world, the appearance of public pianos in Vancouver shows a classical musical instrument still translating well from city-to-city in a digital age.
I have become a zealous advocate for each of us carefully observing the fundamental relationships between people and cities, particularly when it is possible to capture moments that work, seemingly without effort.
Here we see a downtown public space, and simple chess board intervention.
Witness the result, including the camaraderie of strangers and astute observers. The family at play seems as important as the post-match decorum, not to mention the transit stop in the background.
This is not a staged photo. But I would venture that it shows, spontaneously, the very stage sought by over-complex formulations and the populist tenets of today’s urbanism.
Thank you all so much for your support during the first month of putting my new book, Urbanism Without Effort (9781610914420/$3.99), in the public eye.
Whether you’ve read the book yourself, shared it with others, come heard me speak, or simply sent me your thoughts, it means a lot to me to have your company on this adventure.
We’ve had a wonderful release so far. I’ve been thrilled to see the book regularly excerpted in places like Atlantic Cities and Crosscut, and profiled in interviews such as last week’s feature in the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, with more to follow soon.I have also been honored to speak at events sponsored by ULI-Northwest, Futurewise and Great City, and to see the book rank as an Amazon top-ten best seller for urban planning (frequently listed as number one in the Kindle Store for urban planning e-books).
I’m looking forward to sharing more updates with you in the months to come. In the meantime, Seattle friends, please consider coming to hear me talk at Town Hall-Seattle on Wednesday, June 19 at 6:00 p.m., where I will share many visuals from the book and highlight key elements of interest.
As a reminder, you, your friends, and your colleagues can download the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo and other electronic vendors. If you’d like to review the book for a publication or website, you can request a review copy at press@islandpress.org.
If you have any questions or ideas for how to use Urbanism Without Effort in your own work, please get in touch. You can always find the latest information regarding appearances, media and other updates at the book’s website, http://urbanismwithouteffort.com.
At a luncheon this week for the Urban Land Institute’s local sponsors, guest speaker — and Seattle restaurateur — Tom Douglas toyed with the idea of abandoning the Seattle monorail. The move, he explained, would save the cost of future maintenance and repair, and (even better) the monorail track could be replaced with a walkable, elevated green space in the spirit of the High Line, New York City’s much-touted elevated railway-turned-park. In the Tom Douglas version restaurants would, of course, line the old tracks — perhaps, even in the abandoned monorail cars themselves.
It was great to see such a vaunted entrepreneur join the ranks of urbanophiles out to remake ruins — in this case, a ruin that does not yet exist, and on such a grand and provocative scale. But our interest in this subject does not need celebrity validation, and the vision need not be as grand as Douglas’s.
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Today’s post continues as an exclusive entry at Crosscut. For the remainder, click here . Parts of this post are adapted fromUrbanism Without Effort, an e-book fromIsland Press, and based on ideas first presented in The Atlantic Cities.
One inspiration for my new book, Urbanism Without Effort, came in 2010, from an unexpected find in a Seattle used bookstore. This discovery led to interviews and exposure to incomparable photographs, some over a century old.
Given the passage of almost two years, and the considerable number of new readers interested in cities and urban history, the story is well worth a rerun, as slightly updated below.
Here, for new readers and old, is the stirring work of Burton Holmes, a continued and motivating force in my work, and by inference, a catalyst for us all.
“100 years from now I wonder if those in the future who view these images will appreciate the value of … pictures as a means of recording life as is lived in this century… photography is in the truest sense biography –is it not the writing of life in a truly universal language?”
-Burton Holmes, Seoul, Korea, 1899
The Great Recession, climate change and the quest for carbon neutrality have reoriented how we look at cities, the distance between home and work, and the role of the automobile.
A simultaneous, street-based nostalgia targets simpler times, a more human scale and an elusive world of accessible neighborhoods often lost in the memories of earlier generations.
Consider imagery which restores such lost urban memories for those who did not witness modern urban history, and recreates what political writer Alexander Cockburn has termed “the lost valleys of the imagination”.
Such “lost valleys” often grace nearby bookstores and online forays, but quality varies, and frustrates our romantic search to turn back time.
Of all available resources, amid blogs and information byways, no visual record is more compelling than the archived work of seldom remembered, but innovative documentary pioneers, who left breathtaking records of camera artistry: pictures revealing moments when people hardly understood the camera as it recorded the profound change which surrounded them.
One such pioneer, Burton Holmes, preserved imagery in unparalleled human scale, first with black and white, glass negatives, often hand-colored with fine, single hair ermine brushes and through parallel use of motion pictures from the time of their invention.
He showed all that a city can be—while also depicting the changing form and appearance of infrastructure, public spaces and the impact of this change on urban residents.
Travelogues, the Greatest Traveler of His Time, Ed. Genoa Caldwell
His legendary work, which entertained the captive opera-goers in front rows and the general admission crowds in the rear, is well-chronicled in the work of Genoa Caldwell (The Man Who Traveled the World and Travelogues: The Greatest Traveler of His Time, recently republished as Early Travel Photography), as well as by other devotees, and can be readily reviewed in print and online (including the most resource-intensive compilation at burtonholmes.org).
Holmes was not an intentional urban historian. He became a famous stage presenter, who, from the late nineteenth century until the 1950’s, inherited a showman’s tradition from earlier travel lecturers and became synonymous with the new word, “travelogue,” which he favored to stimulate vicarious interest in his art. He brought the first motion picture cameras to the Far East, recorded Tolstoy and the coronation of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and otherwise roamed the world–often to places of danger where a camera had never been– and brought home both organic, natural portraits of life abroad and entertaining still and cinematic visions to halls across America.
However, over and above Holmes’ published travelogue narratives, a particularly intentional urban documentary purpose flows from his photos, as depicted above and below. Photo-archivist and biographer Caldwell has shared hints of this perhaps subconscious resolve in quotations she has compiled in the over 30 years she has devoted to her research. An example of one reference she has found that holistically describes urban ambiance addresses Berlin in 1907.
Holmes noted Berlin as a city of contrasts, where the traveler feels the unseen presence of something fine and beautiful, and it is cleanliness, he said, that pleads most eloquently for Berlin. There, he described how the art of municipal housekeeping is practiced in perfection: “Berlin is the best-kept great city in the world–there are no backyards in Berlin, [and] balconies filled with flowers ornament the buildings, [while] outdoor cafes give impressions of cheerful sociability, and the traveler is confirmed in his impression that Berlin is a city beautiful.”
Holmes’ cameras captured far more than the order he saw in Berlin; he chronicled the impact of new forms of transportation as they were introduced to classical environments, and the resulting evolution of streets and ways of life.
BeIow is a sampling of the collection maintained by Burton Holmes Historical Collection (BHHC), reprinted with special permission and under copyright of BHHC. Caldwell has archived 1700 of an assemblage which once numbered 30,000 photos, the rest lost to the poor condition of time. A range of movie footage, from 200 film cans rediscovered in 2003, now resides at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.
a mode we have lost?
A captivating horse and buggy amid Sydney’s clouds shows a morning routine now lost in Western culture today. Holmes was fascinated by the expanse of the Australian continent and the impact of colonization on native people and place.
A grand Austrian urban stroll provides a model for emulation. Holmes regaled in the “superb edifice” of Vienna’s Grand Opera House, while his camera prioritized the pedestrian view.
Traffic congestion took different forms, often without protection from the elements. Holmes’ photographs were rich with street scenes in world cities. Consider the different social nature of traffic interactions without doors or windows and the different sounds that graced the street.
Early in the last century, Holmes toured Denmark by car. Here, a rare car-sighting south of Copenhagen in 1902 yields to a predominant auto culture on Seattle’s Marion Street by 1934.
Note the human interaction in a public place as captured by Holmes in Italy and France, countries he repeatedly visited in times of war and peace. Today’s increasing attention to sidewalk cafes and public gathering spaces attempts to achieve the ambiance of the photographs below.
Jaffa Gate, in the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, shows the evolution from animal to motorized transport at the sunset of the Ottoman Empire. The Jerusalem chronicled by Holmes is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s narrative in Innocents Abroad.
The gold rush town of Dawson City, Yukon Territory was assembled in weeks with all the vitality of an urban place. Holmes’ many photographs there documented a new town built on speculation with a surprising sense of permanence, amenity, and not least of all, sidewalks.
Holmes’ work offers a central place to rediscover the look and feel of Cockburn’s “lost valleys of the imagination” and provides models to facilitate the regeneration of a classic model of urban life–a full experience shaped not just by where one could drive in a car, but by where one could walk or ride by animal–or access by public transportation. His photographs provide gloss on features to include in new development and the planning of today’s complete streets.
The implications from the photographs are more than academic, as inferred principles of practice for regulation and design emerge. The architect can derive the relation of building and street. The traffic engineer can see inspiration for lanes, surfacing and signage. The lawyer and planner can react to setbacks, and ways to encourage pedestrian spaces while assuring light, air, acceptable noise levels and governance of private use of public spaces.
Perhaps most of all, the child in all of us is transported by time-travel to a fantasy world better than the Wizard of Oz, because the world in the photographs was real and foundational. In the end, the “film as biography” foretold by Holmes in 1899 draws us in, and challenges us to reclaim and relive the best of the city. It is a biography we should read as precedent, both for inspiration and for lessons learned from the consequences of change.
Republished in Grist, on June 29, 2011, in edited form, here, and in Crosscut on September 18, 2010, here. Thanks also to Kaid Benfield for republication in his “Village Green” column in The Huffington Post on September 8, 2010, and his Natural Resources Defense Council Blog on September 9, 2010.
Thank you all so much for your support during the first month of putting my new book, 
