In another postcard for your urbanist, transit-oriented friends, an interurban transit operator guards himself from the sun.
For an additional reference, consider Stephen Killion’s June 24 Architizer post, which provides the nineteenth century history of the U.S. Camel Corps as a prologue to a discussion of transit issues in Los Angeles. He ironically warns that without care, new transit proposals of the Obama-era could go the way of the failed allocation of 28 camels to the city for cargo purposes as part of the Camel Corps’ downsizing in 1863.
Rich city texture (complete with pedestrian and transit opportunities and magnetic color) is another feature of high urbandwidth. Below, renderings of Nice, France display the remade city center focused around the Nice Tramway, which I described in seattlepi.com(click here) last year.
Street performance in a public space is one feature of high urbandwidth.
Here, we return to Seattle’s Occidental Park, (also featured here and, by Dan Bertolet, here), to walk with A.K. “Mimi” Allin, for a strolling read of a complex novel, merged with the notion of enhanced mutual ownership of public space.
Click here to read more about Allin and 4Culture’s site-specific performance exhibit, “Walking in War in Peace”.
Writing and conversing about the urban experience has made one thing clear. Short of the word “urbanism” and its modified variants, there is no one English word which holistically captures the qualities of livable cites or the associated metrics that many commentators tout and exemplify.
Portland’s Jason King supports this point in his wonderful article,”[Fill in the Blank] Urbanism,” which I noted in March. King’s article profiled the range of paired terms which modify the basic urbanism premise–and asked readers to name a favorite.
Others have described the inadequacy of commonly used catchwords. Writing in the Washington Post, on May 8, architect Roger Lewis called for terms far more descriptive than “transit-oriented development” (TOD) to describe the qualities of walkable cities, calling for “multimodal TOD’s”.
Similarly, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Green Lab Director, Liz Dunn, working with Walk Score’s Matt Lerner, have advocated for a Jane Jacobs-based comprehensive metric, the Jane Score, to more completely measure urban diversity and “granularity” and supplement the increasingly recognized Walk Score tool.
With such ever-expanding and thoughtful efforts to diversify the measures applicable to a renewed, compact, walkable, and multimodal urban fabric, it would help to have one word to describe the phenomenon.
I suggest that we are talking about recalibrating urbandwidth around the world.
Consider the recalibrated urbandwidth of City Square in Melbourne, Australia
(This article appears in slightly different form in seattlepi.com on July 21, here. Thanks also to Planetizen for incorporating the original form of this article under the headline “For Lack of a Better Term,” here.)
