An eclectic Provence window below introduces a back and forth conversation between American facades (to the left) and their counterparts (to the right), contrasting often uneventful stylistic reserve and usually empty balconies with traditions of rich color and plantings, angular perspectives and private spaces speaking outward to the street.
What if American cities legislated brighter color amid windows, balconies planted green and encouraged flags and hanging laundry? What if homeowner associations and rental contracts required vegetation and decoration of the interface with the street below?
For all of today’s urbanist dialogue about density, transit and proximity of home and work, an enhanced urban look and feel can also derive from practicing simple traditions of visual diversity.
Here’s a review and look forward, focused on the expanding redefinition of American urban spaces, such as sidewalks and streets, and a symbiotic recalibration of the flanking private domain.
An April 2010 myurbanist entry, “from ancient Rome to sidewalk Saturdays in America”, observed context and possibilities:
In several entries, myurbanist has challenged American placemaking advocates to consider pragmatic approaches when borrowing from qualities of foreign urban spaces, recalling their evolution over thousands of years under different sociocultural circumstances. Likewise, the blog Emergent Urbanism recently cautioned to be mindful of the “patterns of place”.
In American efforts to move from the food court back to the street, we should consider first our own cultural context, and without political will, the tendency of traditional street use permitting and related, safety-based regulatory regimes to discourage more expansive public use of rights-of-way for nontraditional street and sidewalk use.
Certainly, policymakers, the development community and community leaders are gaining momentum through focus upon sidewalk dining ordinances, complete streets programming, and compact and walkable transit oriented developments. But in a time of recession and financial constraint, reinvention will not appear overnight, and allegiance to traditional regulatory schemes dies hard at the interface of public and private property lines.
We then proposed that every Saturday morning, American cities invoke a “quick win”, and allow temporary and selective sidewalk use for two hours. mindful of safety, yet relaxing of bureaucracy.
In the interim, American cities have continued to experiment with redefinitions of traditional uses of the public domain, including street closures, “parklets” in parking spaces and bicycle-oriented suspensions of ordinary traffic.
In particular, the mainstream press has featured coverage of the expansion of streetside dining in the Pacific Northwest premised on relaxed permitting requirements, and urbanist blogs have referenced growing American experimentation with the street as a dining venue.
What else is possible? Here, from afar, is more evidence that street and square, beach and byway all have a greater and unrealized multipurpose capacity, ripe for recalibration in ever-evolving America.
[showtime]
This article also appeared on SustainableCitiesCollective, here, on November 4.
In a walk across a world city, a city that works, experience is framed by very simple things–color and light and the ambient sounds of people and place–and a feeling that somehow public and private spaces are interacting seamlessly, safely and with mutual respect.
Despite the flat overcast light, London this week showed brightness beyond memories of the industrial age. Amid cars and buses and bluster and irregular wear on ornamental facades from long ago, there was vibrancy and clues of reinvention–exemplified by brighter colors, bike sharing, classic urban green and safe spaces, and resplendent sidewalk banter and life.
Perhaps it was imagination, or application of some sort of urbanist filter not present in youth, but storefronts seemed less like gateways and doors less like barriers, sidewalks more like living rooms and neighborhoods more surrounding of public squares, transit stops and car-dodging splendor.
Even if only a hopeful snippet of impressions ripe for realpolitik exception and detraction–for a few hours in late September, from Covent Garden to Neal’s Yard to Piccadilly to Regent Street, from Hyde Park to Knightsbridge and Chelsea and back–it was a movie-like stroll–all about the most famous of urban places becoming new again.
For a full screen slideshow of the merger of history and future, and/or to see more detailed images, click below.
Human settlement is often driven by topography, viewpoints and strategic advantage.
Independent towns and urban neighborhoods alike share an historic affinity for hills. Terrain-intensive cities like San Francisco and Seattle are no exception, and city planning considerations converge around “urban villages” such as Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Capitol Hill and Queen Anne Hill.
Places in their own right, these hilltop centers can serve as the partially self-contained models for the compact and dense urban neighborhoods which are increasingly the vanguard of new century urbanism.
But what about the the hill town of old? Is it an an artifact of the bygone invaders and armies beyond the walls? Touring the dramatic perche´s (“perched”, or hill towns) in the South of France, it is hard to simply dismiss them as an anachronism–especially in light of today’s stated urban ideals.
After all, several common hill town characteristics are consistent with new urbanist principles.
These features include: a blending with with natural topography; a pedestrian identity, with limited vehicular access; an emphasis on aesthetic principles (views to and from); communal groupings of institutions around public open space; careful blending of public pathways and private dwellings; efficient living spaces and allowance for density; as well as innovative bases for water collection and storage and management of sewage and stormwater discharge.
Of course, we can only carry such inspiration so far. Do we see light rail stops at the towns’ base? Energy efficiency and LEED certified construction? These elements are clearly outside the context of the historic examples pictured here.
Nonetheless, we need to take regular walks among human precedent, where under duress, people showed innovation and dynamic placemaking in order to survive.
This article also appeared in Planetizen on September 27 and was adapted for Crosscut, where it appeared on October 14.
“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 previous 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 behind 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 previous 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 by myurbanist 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 Melbourne’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.
Republished in Crosscut on September 18, 2010 in edited form, 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 .
