Today, The Huffington Post includes my essay on city gates and gateways of past and present, with a political twist. Read the full narrative here. A snapshot follows.
observing the city: exploring dreams, not memes
The participation of diverse voices in city decision-making processes is critical to successful urban change. By diverse, I mean not just professionals, politicians and pundits, but everyday people who live and work in city spaces. But before we can participate, we need to hone the power of personal observation.
Like the Londoners depicted in these photographs, we all have stories to tell.
Over the past eight months I have written a book about observing the urban environment, called Seeing the Better City. After much research, many interviews, and sifting through countless experiences and photographs, I concluded that better cities will emerge if city-dwellers really learn to see and understand their urban environment and how human experience intersects with the built world.
In other words, we should strive for a “vocabulary of looking” as the foundation for participation in civic discussion.
A camera and smartphone are great tools for development of this exploration and vocabulary. We can focus on common urban themes, such as street corners, plazas, parks, and other shared spaces, and evaluate what appeals to each of us, and what does not. In my book, I suggest how cities might honor constructive visual input submitted by more than just architects. Throughout, I provide my own examples, with words and photographs called urban diaries, as sample toolboxes for how to evaluate, narrate and summarize city character and urban change over time.
My goal is to find ways to improve civic discussion about what people see in the cities around them. Ultimately, I will be happy if city dwellers learn—with the help of many available resources—how to note carefully their emotional responses to the changes they observe, and premise understanding of urban issues on thoughtful baselines of their own, rather than only the pundit’s words.
Seeing the Better City will be available by early 2017 from Island Press, through local booksellers and Amazon.
© 2009-2016 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy. For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.
‘seeing the better city’ book project begins: a teaser
Long-time readers might enjoy the teaser post at Seeing the Better City about my new book project of the same name. Stay tuned as the project described below unfolds in the coming months:
As ongoing urban processes visibly alter neighborhoods, downtowns and the places between, city dwellers need a practical toolkit to better see, understand and influence the evolution of their cities. In Seeing the Better City (forthcoming from Island Press), Chuck Wolfe outlines a comprehensive users’ guide to urban observation aimed at informing better, and more equitable, plans, policies and political decisions.
Seeing the Better City updates a historical, interdisciplinary tradition of urban observation, with the modern-day “urban diary”, an experiential method of documenting city life and form. Through evocative photography, use of smartphone apps, and other cutting-edge tools, Wolfe empowers readers to explore and document the urban spaces, structures and human activities around them.
For Wolfe’s earlier work, see Urbanism Without Effort (Island Press, 2013)
how Times Square inspires the urbanist ‘little engines that could’
Last week, Island Press Field Notes featured a perspective from several Island Press authors on why Times Square should remain a pedestrian plaza. I was honored to take part, and I wrote the following:
In downtown Seattle last night, I saw the soft glow in the dark of Westlake Park’s evolution from a “little engine that could” to the real deal. The evolution, you may ask? A one-year experiment in private management of a public place, partially inspired by Bryant Park, a New York City example. Yet this particular darkness said, in effect, worry not, for this is just a Friday night off for the Downtown Seattle Association/Metropolitan Improvement District management scheme.
Another New York City example has recently been at least a bit under siege. Like Bryant Park, the conversion of Times Square to a pedestrian plaza has become a model for the American experience. In civic discussions around the country, it is touted as proof of the possible, a domestic shining light of how every city can recreate places for people. Who needs to cite to Mayor Jaime Lerner’s similar accomplishments in Curitiba, Brazil—or to evoke European forbears—when you have an American story for local consumption that easily translates to “why not here”?
So, whether panhandling, or other tourist-oriented aversions drove (no pun intended) a late summer New York re-examination of the pedestrian concept, a “return to what was” for Times Square risks unintended consequences for the rest of us. As Seattle’s Westlake example shows, we covet the emblems and icons of big cities that lead, and for many Americans, the lessons of New York ring truer than Las Ramblas of Barcelona ever will.
If New York slides backward, so may also a multitude of “engines that could” who need the confidence that feeds the Little Engine’s immortal words, “I think I can”.
Image composed by the author in Seattle. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2015 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.
maximizing inclusion while responding to change in Seattle
Now that Mayor Ed Murray has shifted Housing and Livability Agenda (HALA) priorities away from changes to single-family zones and back toward Seattle’s traditional focus on density and urban village or urban centers, it strikes me, based on 30 years of experience, that the real work has barely begun.
Writing now from a world of detached simplicity, while on vacation—far away from my hometown’s bombastic debate—I am benefiting from the gestalt of reflection. Suddenly, I remember simpler, yet similar times 25 years ago, and have some cautionary tales to tell about human nature amid the specter of change.
Click here for the rest of today’s essay in Seattle’s Crosscut.
Image composed by the author in Seattle. Click on the image for more detail. © 2009-2015 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.