Shrinking Cities: Detroit's Agony (1990)

A clip that spawned a lot of conversation within our reading group, from 1990, Diane Sawyer reporting on ABCs Primetime Live, in a series called 'Detroit's Agony' - which looks at Mayor Coleman Young's legacy, and plays on Detroit as 'the first urban domino to fall...' [More after the video]


The shock of 'Devils Night', guns, drugs, and violence has changed to a different narrative in 20+ years, but not necessarily one that is any more positive - at least in terms of media coverage.  Is Detroit still the end of the road?  Is this just a continuation to the story?  Is what we are witnessing now is the continuation of the city as ruin?  Interesting history, if only one of the media itself and it's framing of issues both then and now.

To New Horizons

Oh the sick and twisted future... a film from General Motors in 1940 entitled 'To New Horizons' talking about the world twenty years later.  Yes indeed, "Man continually strives to replace the old, with the new!" 

Spotted on one of my favorite new sites - Copenhagenize.  Check it out.

Pruitt Igoe Now

Another good ideas competition, Pruitt Igoe Now the infamous St. Louis housing complex that was demolished in 1972 and considered one of the touchstones in the 'death' of modernism.  The site is typical of the towers in the park ideal most notably ascribed to public housing and derived from version of Le Corbusier's Radiant City designs.  In this case, bars of housing were interwoven with roads, parking, and open space within immense superblocks as seen in the aerial and plan of the original development.

From the site: "Pruitt Igoe Now seeks the ideas of the creative community worldwide: we invite individuals and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape architects, designers, writers and artists of every discipline to re-imagine the 57 acres on which the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was once located."   What could the site be today?

Part of the site has been rebuilt as a school, but a large portion is still undeveloped, and has developed its own feral ecology, as shown in these before and after shots of the demolition of building C-15 in 1972 and the same site in 2010.

Even if you aren't interested in the competition, a quick tour around the site gives a really fascinating look at some of the history of this contentious site.  Also, check out the new documentary 'The Pruitt-Igoe Myth' for some more background... here's the trailer.


The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: an Urban History – Film Trailer from the Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Vimeo.

RBC: Urban Earth: Mumbai

Urban Earth: Mumbai  |  Raven-Elison & Askins

Urban Earth, with studies in Mumbai, Mexico City, and London:  Their approach: “walking across some of Earth’s biggest urban areas, to explore their spatial realities for the people who live there and challenge dominant media discourses regarding the places in which most of us now live.  The idea is to walk a transect across an urban area, taking a photograph every ten steps.” (84) 

The concept reminds me of Christopher Girot's essay 'Vision in Motion' in the Landscape Urbanism Reader (Waldheim, 2006), on the role of new representational techniques and the ability to document the interstitial, non-destination spaces, echoing Conan, the 'black holes' in the urban fabric that   “...have become the dominant feature of peripheries and urbanized countries… need to consider these long non-entities as probably equally significant as the most celebrated vistas…” (Waldheim 2006, p.100)

Each frame becomes a story which is fascinating on it's own although nothing you would typically document in the day to day.  Here's a random image of London from their Flickr stream...

And the transect is also interesting as an experience, alluding to Girot's new representational techniques, as seen in this great video of the stitched together for Mexico City:

:: video from Urban Earth YouTube page

(from Ecological Urbanism, Mostafavi & Doherty, eds. 2010, p.84-93)

Tales from Portlandia

As it is always important to laugh at oneself  - the 6-part IFC Original short-based comedy series PORTLANDIA, created, written by and starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein will premiere January 21, 2011 at 10:30 PM ET/PT. Each episode's character-based shorts draw viewers into "Portlandia," the creators' dreamy and absurd rendering of Portland, Oregon.



Bloody brilliant... Can't wait for more.

The Suburban Prelude: The City (1939)

An interesting film, created as part of the 1939 New York World's Fair, is 'The City', an heavily anti-urban vision of the perils of the the modern city agglomeration.  Using a number of images from both the smoky and polluted industrial Pittsburgh and the crowded, frenetic cosmopolitan New York City of the 1930s, the film sets the stage of life in the city as overwhelming and unhealthy.  Written by Lewis Mumford, and indicative of his nostalgic view of cities, the film does offer up an alternative - a Howard-esque garden-city model of inspired new American Greenbelt towns (notably Radburn, NJ and Greenbelt, MD) that were at the time a planning panacea that reflected the forthcoming suburban ideal.

The Internet Archive has a variety of formats for download -  Part I is available here; Part II here.  Below is a short excerpt.

Coming from the ideology of The Regional Planning Association of America's plea for community chaotic cities and urban sprawl," the film was screened next to the Little Theatre in the Science and Education Building which was ironically next to the General Motor's Futurama exhibit, which was an interpretation of which would become the interstate highway system.  A great article in Wired offers some of the impact: "GM's ride presented a utopia forged by urban planning. Sophisticated highways ran through rural farmland and eventually moved into carefully ordered futuristic cities. "You have to understand that the audience had never even considered a future like this," says Howland. "There wasn't an interstate freeway system in 1939. Not many people owned a car. They staggered out of the fair like a cargo cult and built an imperfect version of this incredible vision."

:: image via Wired

The ideology of good planning in new towns, coupled with a the adjacent highway system of easy mobility offered by Futurama, offers a somewhat creepy glimpse into what would become the ubiquitous suburban pattern of the next 50+ years.  There is definitely a biased slant (which is pretty comical at times), giving it a feeling of satire - but was the information (essentially a discrediting 'snuff film' on the city) was dead serious at the time.  Some commentary info from IMDB:

"Made by a group of people with, if not an axe to grind, a purpose in mind, which appears to be a plug for future suburbia and back to the idyllic towns of the past and the Big City would just be a place where people work but not live. Or something like that, as it is told in a schizophrenic method that primarily drones on about ...it started like this and it was good, and it becames this and it was bad, yada, yada, yada. Based on how America looks today...large metroplexes surrounded by super highways surrounded by look-alike suburbs with more super highways leading out to other metroplexes--- the goal was accomplished but the results aren't what was envisioned in 1939. The film was made possible by funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and has a definite leftward-slant which is no surprise based on some of the names connected with the original film."

The City from Post-Classical Ensemble on Vimeo.

While undoubtedly influential on the anti-metropolitan sentiment that continued well beyond WWII, the film is notable as a mainstream media outlet for planning, bringing a message to a wide audience (even with a score from Mr. Americana himself, Aaron Copland).  I would love to see the pitch to hollywood execs, wondering how a didactic film such as this would fly today, with its focus on urban planning and contemporary society (compared to say, the more evocative treatment of Baltimore in 'The Wire' which have become our visions of the City today).

:: The Wire - image via Obit magazine

How would this fly in todays media-saturated environment? It is perhaps plausible, an analog being the contemporary documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' which surprised many with a wide theatrical success on a more academic subject.  (Perhaps due to it being applicable to all of us - or maybe we just really like Al Gore)  Is there an opportunity for a new form of documentary that can fill the niche in a similar way, or does this need to be dressed up to get the point across.  Something for HBO to consider, versus The History Channel.

Lots of clips out there if you can't download the full thing.  Check out some additional shorter video clips from YouTube:  Thanks to Prof. Abbott @ PSU for introducing this one in class.

The Wilderness Downtown

I have in the past alluded to the 'Soundtrack of Spaces' linking music to our physical environment.  I know most people have amused themselves with this video experiment, but I finally found myself engaging with the Arcade Fire's interactive video 'The Wilderness Downtown' - perhaps a literal interpretation of the space/music connection.  The narrative film, which juxtaposes an address (in particular, the home where you grew up) with the song 'We Used to Wait' off the recent release - 'The Suburbs'.

The interactive film, by Chris Milk, provides an interactive journey using footage along with Google aerial and street views to provide a 'story' based on a familiar location from one's childhood.  In this case, it's a quasi-suburb in Minot, North Dakota, where I spent a good portion of my childhood in my post- air force brat youth.  While, it is virtually impossible to capture the narrative in stills, but here goes - which takes the viewer through the stages of running, locating in the neighborhood, discovery, and inevitably transformation. Whatever address you choose - just try it (although you must have the latest versions of Safari or Chrome for performance).

 

 

You find youself transfixed to the images, both to find out what is coming next, but also to catch a glimpse of the house, the yard, the street you grew up on.  It's a fascinating interpretation of the song, which After a brief pause, there's an interlude of interactivity, where you are prompted to write a postcard to yourself as a young person - as you contemplate the meaning of the lyrics (which much as cities, spaces, and childhood memories, are innately personal).   From the first verse:

But by the time we met

The times had already changed

So I never wrote a letter

I never took my true heart

I never wrote it down

So when the lights cut out

I was left standing in the wilderness downtown

And then the transformation of the place to the 'wilderness' begins, with an eruption of vegetation emerging from the streets, bursting forth in vegetal violence.  It's not imbued with a great amount of depth, other than the regret of youth and the inevitability of change - simplified in verse.

So what does this mean?  Without overdramatizing it, and not to cop out on the narrative implications (well sort of), but it means different things to different people.  It might be an impressive demo for Google, or maybe a mark of the creativity of an inventive Indie band trying to differentiate from the growing Indie masses.  I think it's more a question of representation and context - an anthem, given a flexible visual, for the conceptual framework of 'The Suburbs' in which the artists sing about.

It infuses the music, and why not the video - personalizing the alienation of suburban experience, wishing for something as dramatic as foliar anarchy - not a beanstalk to climb, but just for a short break from the boredom and monotony of the place.  The interesting aspect, brilliantly rendered in the snippets of video, is that the theme is somewhat universal - as the tone of the song and the moody visuals lead one, even if set in downtown Manahattan, to a suburban experience in need of transformation.  That's the power of music as a soundtrack for spaces, and that's kind of the point.

Calthorpe on Portland...

"...a global model of Transit-Oriented Development."

Alan Berger on Landscape Waste

Via World Landscape Architect a two-part video of Alan Berger: "CUSP Conference organisers recently posted a two part video of Alan Berger’s presentation at the 2009 CUSP Conference on Landscape Waste. An interesting look at landscapes waste resulting from industrial processes."



Check out part 2 here.

Living System Design

A great video with a lecture on 'The Practice of Living System Design" (via Arch Daily): "William Reed AIA, a nationally recognized sustainability expert and architect at the Integrative Design Collaborative, Regenesis and Delving Deeper, spoke on developing a whole-systems design process that lifts building and community planning into full integration and co-evolution with living systems in the region. Reed is a founding board member of the U.S. Green Building Council and co-author of The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building: Redefining the Practice of Sustainability."

William Reed: The Practice of Living System Design from BSA on Vimeo.

Check out the fantastic Integrative Design Collaborative to learn more about the process of moving beyond chasing checklist points and truly identifying options for regenerative design.

The Beauty of Dirt!

I caught a screening of the documentary Dirt! The Movie last week on Oregon Public Broadcasting as part of their Earth Day series. Worth checking out for a number of reasons - those with some background will be inspired by some of their eco-heroes like Wes Jackson, Majora Carter and Alice Waters. Others will be introduced to the likes of Paul Stamets, Vandana Shiva, and Wangari Maathai to name a few of the many featured in the film. Overall, the film reinforces the idea of our soil (sorry, still have a hard time calling it dirt) as a living matrix that supports life on our planet.

"Dirt feeds us and gives us shelter. Dirt holds and cleans our water. Dirt heals us and makes us beautiful. Dirt regulates the earth's climate. Dirt is the ultimate natural resource for all life on earth. Yet most humans ignore, abuse, and destroy our most precious living natural resource.Consider the results of such behavior: mass starvation, drought, floods, and global warming, and wars. If we continue on our current path, Dirt might find another use for humans, as compost for future life forms. It doesn't have to be that way. Another world, in which we treat dirt with the respect it deserves, is possible and we'll show you how.

The film offers a vision of a sustainable relationship between Humans and Dirt through profiles of the global visionaries who are determined to repair the damage we've done before it's too late. There are many ways we can preserve the living skin of the earth for future generations. If you care about your food, water, the air you breathe, your health and happiness..."

Aside from the annoying animations, lack of depth in some areas, and an inconsistent narrative thread, the film is enjoyable and worthwhile in connecting to a number of resources for further exploration. View the trailer for the film here:

FLOW: A Competition

Winners of the international competition „FLOW“ arrived via an email today. The european competition is: "... for students in the last two years of architecture, engineer, art, landscape, town planning, sociology and young architects were born after December 31st, 1975 in Europe."



The subject area of the competition is the City of Brussels, covering the port area and the canal in the center of the City: "This competition of ideas aims to enable participants to propose an innovative and daring architectural project which simultaneously envisages the environmental, social, technical and economic dimensions involved. The objective of the contest is to reflect on future new lifestyles and organisations, to prefigure them and to overturn mentalities, which will make it possible to provoke reflections between the private and public sector."

Student First prize: S1 Mutations
School : UNIFE (Italy) Alessandro Bellini, Jacopo Casolai

"The complexity of the problems encountered facing the competition and the dimensional matter of the canal in Brussels, encouraged us to seek out a programmatic approach. This will provide some guidelines disregarding, for the first time, the real architectural intervention.

A lot of documents and open questions involve the European Capital and specifically its 14 km canal: starting from that amount of informations and from the specific FLOW competition's requests we draw up a critical MANIFESTO in ten points. This document underline the canal's points of weakness and possible courses of actions, and suggest a method, called induced mutations, which is able to generate more and more well-framed urban transformations."

VIDEO 1 MANIFESTO from alessandro bellini on Vimeo.

Young Professional First prize: P7 The line
(Deutschland) Marine Miroux, Christoph Hager, Ingo Hüller, Demian Rudaz

La Ligne from Marine Miroux on Vimeo.

Check out all of the entries on the website. I think the idea of the videos as part of competition deliverables are a great idea - as it allows the static imagery to coalesce into a more complete narrative which aids in understanding the specifics.

Paper Cities

Another great video from Digital Urban shows a snippet of 'Metropolis' a time-lapse film by Rob Carter showing the evolution of Charlotte, NC: "Made entirely from images printed on paper, the animation literally represents this sped up urban planners dream, but suggests the frailty of that dream, however concrete it may feel on the ground today. Ultimately the video continues the city development into an imagined hubristic future, of more and more skyscrapers and sports arenas and into a bleak environmental future. It is an extreme representation of the already serious water shortages that face many expanding American cities today; but this is less a warning, as much as a statement of our paper thin significance no matter how many monuments of steel, glass and concrete we build."

Metropolis by Rob Carter - Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

Retrofitting Suburbia

A nice long video from TEDx Atlanta featuring Ellen Dunham-Jones on Retrofitting Suburbia that "...takes you through retrofitted suburbia, transforming dead malls into buzzing downtown centers."

Food City

Via ArchDaily, this study by MVRDV, The Why Factory and Stroom Den Haag looks at urban farming in the relationship to global food supplies. As David Basulto adds: "...urban farming goes more in the direction of the last phrase of the video: “could it (urban farming) help bringing some agriculture into the cities to bring us closer to our food again?”.

:: via ArchDaily - Animation by Wieland Gouwens

Another video applied to Manhattan.

Green Street Video

Via Causecast, a video about Green Streets in Portland: "Net Green News reports on how Portland Oregon handles their rainfall in a more natural, sustainable way. Portland receives an annual 37 inches of rain per year... and one way to help prevent overflooding of streets and rivers is to build curbside “green streets,” which are vegetative islands between roads and sidewalks. They plants absorb the water and the soil breaks down the chemical runoff from cars. Net Green News adds that Portland has budgeted $1.4 Billion by the end of 2011 to manage the stormwater, and plans to create an additional 150 green streets in that time, totaling 900 citywide."

FOOD inc.

The beauty of being taken down by illness is the opportunity to lay on the couch and catch up with some movies that have been in the queue. One such film was FOOD inc., a documentary that provided a concise summary of the content of Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma - two books (both now films) that, amongst others, literally spawned dozens of books and other films about our nations food industry.



A clip from the website: "... filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults."

Finally, here's the trailer for the film... perhaps it was being overly medicated, or groggy, but this film really moved me and is worth checking out (for those of you on Netflix, you can stream it online if you just can't wait for that next red envelope).

Ghost Highway: Mount Hood Freeway

It's fascinating to dig into some of the historical legacies that have existed throughout planning over time. Some seem like missed opportunities - while others show that perhaps sometimes cooler heads will prevail, and we think of the awfulness of what might have been. Nowhere in Portland's planning history is this more evident than the thankfully unbuilt Mount Hood Freeway, which would have literally chopped to bits the inner east side in the mid 1960s with a network of high capacity roadways.



It's also interesting to see the genesis of this idea, from none other than the infamous Robert Moses. From the Permatopia site on Dead Highways: "This map from the Portland Planning Division's 1966 development plan illustrates Robert Moses' vision for a city girdled by freeways. Red indicates existing freeways; green indicates freeways that were never built."


:: image via Willamette Week

From some older coverage on the WW site: "The story of the freeway's demise is a tale of urban America after World War II and a lesson in what distinguishes Portland from other West Coast cities. It gave us strong neighborhoods, proud schools and MAX. It cemented the region's commitment to ecology and the reputation of a brilliant political leader. The murder not only saved 1,750 households in Southeast Portland from the wrecking ball, it also established Portland's philosophy of urban livability-the idea that cities are for people, not just for commerce and cars."

It may be difficult to comprehend, but the slice of the Mount Hood Freeway would have edge along was is currently Clinton Street, one of the hip neighborhood commercial pocket in southeast. An portion of a map shows the dashed line slicing down this street.


:: image via Permatopia

And a view down current Clinton Street @ 26th:


:: image via Portlandize

Taking a cue from the planning wisdom at the time, Moses planned Portland for auto-dominated greatness. From the Portland Mercury:

"Sixty-six Septembers ago, a Portland city commissioner invited the powerful (and, these days, infamous) transportation planner Robert Moses to come to Rose City and write its road construction plan. Moses, a freeway mogul whose most lasting legacy is the massive byways slicing apart New York's boroughs, brought a team of men and holed up for two months in a downtown hotel. After exploring the city and crunching numbers, the men whipped up an 86-page blueprint for Portland's future.

It was in this plan that Portland was first divided by the inky lines that would eventually become I-205, I-84, I-5, I-405, and Highway 26. It was Moses' men who first drew the Fremont Bridge onto a photo of Portland. In white ink, they imagined the freeway to be a suspension bridge running across the river and down into the current Overlook neighborhood. But they also imagined a lot more.

To modernize and meet the demands of a growing economy and expanding population, back in 1943 Moses argued that Portland must surround itself with freeways—an inner ring carrying traffic through the city with another freeway ring encircling its outer limits."

The other part of the legacy that is visible is the dead end off- and on-ramps that show up along many of the stems of this future highway system... a reminder of what might have been.


:: image via Portland Mercury

More of this legacy: "People can drive past on Division or Clinton streets every day and never know it’s there. Indeed, it wouldn’t be there at all, if supporters of the Mount Hood Freeway had had their way. The diminutive Piccolo Park (Southeast 28th Avenue between Division and Clinton streets, 503-823-7529) cuts a grassy swath through a residential block. The land was acquired by the state in the 1970s for a freeway, which would have roared through this historic neighborhood, but the freeway planning faltered and in 1989 the parcel was turned into a charming city park."

If the benefits aren't obvious, a video from Streetfilms highlights the result, in a study on the neighborhood left behind, versus that which was destroyed through freeway expansions. "Clarence Eckerson Jr., takes us to Portland to see the results and posits that his own neighborhood in Brooklyn might have benefited from similar forethought during the planning phase of the Robert Moses-designed Brooklyn-Queens Expressway."

WPA Video: Local Code / Real Estates

I managed to butcher the announcement of the WPA 2.0 finalists a few weeks back... (which should be up to date now)... and was made aware of it thanks to Ben Golder, one of the team members from the Local Code team. He recently sent me this link to a video of their project. I will post some more when they are available, but for now enjoy this one.

WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates from Nicholas de Monchaux on Vimeo.

Quest for the Livable City

For an upcoming seminar class that myself and my colleague Brett Milligan are teaching in the Winter Quarter at the University of Oregon Architecture Program here in Portland, I've been doing a good bit of research on our local planning. Look for some upcoming posts here and at Brett's blog FAD on the topic of Portland's Urban Edge.


:: Portlands Urban Growth Boundary

The class will investigate the phenomenon of the Portland Urban Edge in . One recent resource that I picked up from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is an hour-long documentary called 'Quest for the Livable City', part of their Making Sense of Place Series.


:: image via Northern Light Productions

I just finished watching the DVD and it's a great overview of some of the pros and cons of our unique system of land use planning, a passable primer for understanding the edge in a number of ways. Check out a quick trailer here: