Category: urban views

rediscovering the urban eye of a child

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

Well-composed photographs are an essential part of understanding urbanism. I have suggested before that writing about city life (in an urban diary) can be best enhanced with a camera. A recent overseas trip only strengthened that point of view.

Prior to rediscovering four photographs, now digitized here, my thoughts about cameras did not entertain the child’s sense of the city. But upon rediscovery, I recalled a not unusual, hand-me-down dynamic of family tradition. My father was an urban planning professor, and, while growing up, I watched him photograph for purposes of later sketching, teaching and advocating the role of urban imagery.

In a 1965 article (M.R. Wolfe, “A Visual Supplement to Urban Social Studies”), he argued that several then-leading studies of American communities (e.g. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City and Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown) partially missed the mark because they lacked diagrams and pictures:

Many social studies of communities refer implicitly or explicitly to urban form without so much as a picture, map or diagram. Yet visual material can make a contribution to understanding the urban environment itself, the interrelationship of society and environment, and the development of techniques for study and communication.

Acknowledging an inherited penchant for city observation only spurred a further question—will my own children, now college age, have similar inclinations?

My daughter, who is a geography major, hinted at some further inter-generational osmosis, while studying in Italy this past summer. My son, who is a journalism major, seems to be a different sort of chronicler, with a focus on words and artwork for now.

Several commentators have recently written about the role of children in defining the urban environment going forward. Kaid Benfield, citing to Scott Doyon, wed smart growth and smart parenting, and the merit of a child-oriented approach to help define community livability.

Witness their cited measures of success such as safe trips to buy a popsicle.

A child’s safe popsicle journey is only the foundation for urban exploration. Given the symbiotic relationship between parenting, children and defining community, we should offer opportunity whenever possible for children to photograph and interpret cities.

For instance, what if we were able to send children around the world, on a kid’s photo contest with an urban twist? What if we gifted such journeys and a camera, and said:

“Look around and decide what you like about what you see. Take photos and explain them by telling us what is important to you, including what you wish was around you in your city.”

The rediscovered photographs illustrated here provide a retrospective example of such a gift. I took them in 1968, on one of several opportune trips with my urban planning professor father. They were taken with my first true camera—a Kodak Instamatic—which produced the 26mm, grainy renderings now emulated by iPhone applications such as Hipstamatic.

Frankly, I do not remember taking these photos, nor whether I was imitating the shots my father might have taken moments before. But 43 years later, here is my belated “contest entry” explanation of what I liked and was trying to show:

  • Cities organized around important public places, like churches and squares and towers.
  • Monuments located in these public places, some new, and some that have been there a very long time, to honor people or events from history.
  • Notable walking areas where people were separated from cars.
  • Cities that honored the water around them, and built themselves so that things were close together and work was close to home.
  • Cities where, in the face of a wall, there were different layers from several eras, that told the story of how the city grew.

Twelve year olds today need not wait almost half a century before answering “what you like about what you see.”

And I’ll wager that even without the benefit of my admitted hindsight, their answers, and urban diaries, would advance the dialogue of communities ripe for inheritance and renewal.


All images composed by the author in Rovinj and Split, Croatia, and Udine, Italy in 1968. Click on each image for more detail. Cross-posted in The Atlantic on September 23 and Sustainable Cities Collective on September 22.

experiencing the sonata of density

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, multimedia, placemaking, urban abstractions, urban views9 Comments

Take a creative break from today’s active discussions about urban density with a sonata that examines compact development examples from across the world.

To view, click on the video below.

All images composed by the author. Music composed by the author and Oscar Spidahl, and performed by Mr. Spidahl on a Steinway Model B at Sherman Clay, Seattle.

confronting the urban mirror

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views19 Comments

To my mind, one of the most compelling features of a provocative urban environment is a place where people watch people—which becomes a small-scale human observatory.

Such places are often indicative of safe public environments, including active streets, corners and squares. They are particularly prevalent in cultures where neighbors readily interact, and the seams between public and private are softer than zoning setbacks, while still allowing for a private world.

From Lecce, Italy today, I am focusing on qualities of urban spaces we can learn from, rather than oft-quoted metrics or other indices of success.

The sustainable cities we seek should include small places, where, as here, when the bustle of life begins in the morning and evening, people interact with facets of the city around them.

I suspect that workable density, in the city of the future, will abound with the types of spaces readily ascertainable from cities of the past.

We need places where we sit on the edges of the public realm and look in the mirror, to be reminded of who we really are.

All images composed by the author. Submitted from Lecce, Italy. For more detail, click on each image below.

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discerning successful elements of people, place and urbanism

On By Chuck WolfeIn everyday urbanism, pedestrianism, placemaking, sustainability, urban views, vignettes12 Comments

Nothing is better for advocates of urbanism than simple immersion in the look and feel of a successful, authentic place.

After a week of observation in the cities, towns and villages of Pugila, Italy, most notable is the age-old, multi-dimensional relationship between people and such places, especially given American aspirations—often rhetorical—for walkable and liveable cities back home.

Here, the people and place dynamic is intrinsic to climate and tradition, and naturally occurs amid commerce and curiosity, along streets, beside buildings and as a component of cross-town strolls. It can be read in faces, the simplicity of child’s play and nearby mealtime banter, often without pattern or prescription.

What elements might be isolated, and extracted for good use elsewhere?

Vignettes abound along streets and in public squares. Does a bouncing ball against a venerable door suggest certain types of urban playgrounds? Do open windows to the wind suggest building orientations that work? Do street vendors have lessons for markets and “street food” back home? What provides a sense of safety in crowds, at all times of day?

These illustrative questions suggest the power of imagery in inquiry about diverse urban settings, and only the beginning of adapting human-scale lessons from abroad to the often two-dimensional world of American urbanism.

Submitted from Otranto, Italy. All images composed by the author.

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rediscovering the road to the sustainable city

On By Chuck WolfeIn compact development, everyday urbanism, infill development, infrastructure, pedestrianism, placemaking, urban views14 Comments
Urban integration with geography

Those of us who write about cities should be students of history and experience, and with some humility listen to scholars and the legacy of urban development from around the world. In that sense, a recent summary of sustainable city characteristics by Harvard Professor Joan Busquets provides considerable food for thought and exploration.

According to Busquets, the most sustainable cities integrate natural geography and systems (such as water) into the urban fabric, provide a comfortable city center and have long-lasting, flexible designs. His formula for a merger of geography, comfort and flexibility embraces many issues in today’s urban dialogue, such as increasing opportunities to walk and use transit, to live closer to work and to consequently increase density and the efficient use of urban space.

The comfortable city center

I take from Busquets that a sustainable city also tactfully manages the transition from rural to urban, from country to city. Today’s tools seek to enhance this symbiotic town and country relationship, from the latest regional planning efforts (as recently acknowledged by Kaid Benfield) to innovative organizations such as the Cascade Land Conservancy, which has pioneered incentives for rural conservation in return for more concentrated urban development in Washington State.

Busquets describes the sustainable city as the historical city, which to me, cries for evidence—a physical realm of the sort championed in the late Edmund Bacon’s 1967 classic, Design of Cities, looking to traditional patterned interplay between people and place than modern regulatory tools.

The flexible city on the road to the square

How did this physical transition from country to city happen in history? How was the change in surroundings designed—or not—as one approached the city center? How did streets and alleys play magical roles in guiding travelers to anticipate arrival at focal points of commerce, government and public squares? What of angles and curves, color and light, all modified by architectural features, elevations and building materials? In times of infrastructure shortfall—and absent the ability to redevelop major swaths of land—this element of implementing Busquets’ formulation of geography, comfort and flexibility risks jeopardy, but we should not lose sight of the inquiry and potential lessons learned.

Last week, when discussing “sustainable storefronts“, I suggested that highly evolved cities successfully implement universal urban characteristics from elsewhere in a local context. Other related building blocks covered earlier include third places, corners and fusion businesses.

Next week, while abroad, I’ll be looking hard at how such building blocks can fit together again in places that largely play well with their surrounding settings—in support of the successful integration of natural geography, comfort and flexibility along the way.

All images composed by the author in Puglia, Italy, where he will return next week.