How many of us fear the darkness of the city? Is safety measured by statistics or perception?
Here, from the street, hidden possibilities intrigue the imagination amid open and closed businesses, shadows and light.
Category: urban views
the universal urbanism of the baseball field
Baseball, borne of street ancestry, has always been the sport of cities. Through perspective, and the lens of new urbanism, today’s modern ballparks display the oft-stated quest for a compact and community-oriented world on foot. We need not seek the validity of urban return through articles and studies. Confirmation is as simple as immersion in the crowd.
“waiting for the aqua-urban” and other shoreline tales
Not unlike the street edge, the shoreline offers a range of human impacts and activities at the merger with a common domain. Transport, religion, water, work, and waiting all grace the cross-world scenes below.
“Waiting for the aqua-urban”
Urban waves
The mosque of future past
Water transport of future past
The working waterfront
The fishing waterfront, skyline in view
“Waiting for the aqua-urban” in the southern hemisphere, skyline in view
forms of placemaking and the role of ruins
The chatter today is all about placemaking. We have often let “local place” wither away. So we rush to rediscover what landscape essayist J.B. Jackson termed a past golden age–“a time when we seek to restore the world around us to something like its former beauty”.
Along the way, we encounter many types of places, functional and symbolic.
Below, the vital Easter community of St. Peter’s Square in Rome gives way to the evolved and rustic, sea-oriented towns of Port Townsend, Washington, Manarola in the Italian Cinque Terre, and the Orcas, Washington ferry landing.
Here we see transformative places. While function of buildings can evolve, the vitality of place remains as our senses witness new contexts for human interaction with tradition, time and transport. Perhaps now more touristic than pious or seafaring, such places live on.
But is it fair to say that some places are “less place than the next”, because they are new, reflect only modern consumerism or somehow deface an edifice? What of a suburban mall, or mere graffiti along a path?
Surely these are places, too, but with inherent value distinctions. While not downtown, indoor malls remain vital retail centers, and while not museum art, spontaneous expression has legitimacy, often even when rendered without permission or legal sanction.
And finally, what of a gravestone in a company town no longer serving its industry? What of a true ruin, or vestige, such as the Coliseum?
In “The Necessity for Ruins” (1980), Jackson answered unequivocally, first identifying the need for “that interval of neglect” before renewal and reform: ruins “correct history”.
“Ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins”.
integrating street safety discussions going forward
In discussion of public safety issues in urban areas, law enforcement, design and planning issues often remain in their silos, devoid of integration. Ongoing neighborhood policing and social service initiatives should be more outrightly integrated with the renewed focus on environmental and urban design criteria for safe streetscapes.
Concepts of “Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design” (CPTED)–frequently international in nature–have been present for decades and were implied in Jane Jacobs’ work.
Similar safety-enhancement approaches addressing perceived safety of female transit users have recently received wide attention in the professional and local press. Many cities and civic associations (such as the Downtown Seattle Association) have also advocated for integration of such concepts. As advocacy efforts for pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure funding accelerate, enhanced policy and regulation encouraging such principles for safety will present further discussion opportunities for agreement by interested parties.
In Seattle, after a see-saw match of legislation and veto focused on aggressive panhandling, we, like other cities, could benefit from an integrated and multifaceted discussion of truly “complete streets”.
A recent visit to Melbourne, Australia showed certain CPTED principles along neighborhood streetcar lines, including ample (but glare-protective) night-lighting, territorial sensitivities to illuminated, sidewalk-oriented window areas, enhancement of the role of passing vehicles, transparent protection from weather at building entries, and low bushes and/or lower picket-type fencing along the street to limit access while allowing for entry visibility.