I am happy to report that a recent essay was published in 'Atlantis' Magazine, which is published by Polis and collects writings that make "...the link between students,
academics and professionals besides the Polis activities. This magazine
is our medium to keep you as member up to date about everything going on
in the urbanism & landscape architecture world. The issue 22.4 discusses concepts around the 'Urban Landscape' and features contributions from a wide range of authors.
The essay "Land- 'scape' / Land- 'space': Pedantic, Semantic or just Anagrammatic" is a tongue-in-cheek play on words that carries with it a more serious message. The dialogue around landscape urbanism has been called pedantic, and the splitting of hairs could be dismissed, particularly by those uninformed and who disagree with the concepts, as mere semantics. The anagrammatic is purely a place on words. The content, revolving around an exploration of the terms 'landscape' and 'urbanism', and more specifically the parallels of the anagrammatic terms 'space' and 'scape' begin the discussion.
Using definitions from JB Jackson's essay 'The Word Itself', the parallels between space and scape are delineated, as Jackson's cultural reading of landscape as "...a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence.” (Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 1984) This expands our idea of landscape beyond scenery and greenery to encompass a more broad understanding of 'context'.
Urbanism is also investigated, starting with Wirth's 1938 essay 'Urbanism as a Way of Life' and tracing the divergence of urbanism as 'study' to that of action. I claim we need to differentiate between the study of urban areas and the design and planning activities. This will allow us to operate in a shared space for dialogue:
"Thus study equates to urbanism (of which there can be many types of study), and practice equates to disciplinary modes and interdisciplinary contexts, such as urban design, architecture, landscape architecture and planning (of which there can be many types of solution). The distinction allows us to avoid binary argument because there are infinite types of study and methods of solving problems – each driven by the unique context. Dialogue and critique can still operate – but there will more transparency and it won’t be summed in an either/or proposition. The complexity of urban areas in our contemporary world is too immense for only one of two solutions"
The end along with a call for more clarity in writing about these terms, specifically the need for clear definitions when discussing terms. We are too loose with terminology today, and the overall impact and reach of our discussion suffers from this. Whichever way you choose to interpret and intervene the urban conditions, there needs to be shared understanding of fundamental issues, because, as I mention: "In the end, no discussion or argument (binary or otherwise) is worth much if it happening around vague language..."
Comments and discussion, with clear definitions, always welcome.
I was struck by a recent mis-use of the term landscape urbanism in this article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution on the need for climate change inspired floating homes. Quoting Thai landscape architect Danai Thaitakoo on the need for dealing with innundation.
"Climate change will require a radical shift within design practice from
the solid-state view of landscape urbanism to the more dynamic,
liquid-state view of waterscape urbanism," says Danai, who is involved
in several projects based on this principle. "Instead of embodying
permanence, solidity and longevity, liquid perception will emphasize
change, adaptation."
While amphibious architecture is nothing new, and i agree that it will become more common in the future there are two points. The first is minor - that of the mis-characterization of landscape urbanism as 'solid-state' and 'embodying permanence, solidity and longevity'. If there's any flavor of urbanism that emphasizes change and adaptation, it's landscape urbanism - so i think there's a disconnect in that above paragraph. Just saying.
Second, and more troubling, is the idea that we must react to climate change by building floating structures - rather than address the topic at hand. It's similar in nature to dealing with semi-urban forest fires by designating fire-safety clearing zones of tinder and brush around houses, rather than looking at not building homes in these areas - or heaven forbid - letting them burn. Or coming up with vertical farms due to our misguided agricultural subsidies and policies that make it impossible to grow a variety of food on terra firm.
Its cause. Not effect. We spend way too much time on solutions to problems and calling it need-inspired innovation - rather than getting to the real root of the problems themselves. May not be as press-worthy of sexy, but at least its real.
Arsenal
Moving along with the Shrinking Cities readings, the first part of 'Origins of the Urban Crisis' by Segrue recounts the development of the City of Detroit around WWII as the 'Arsenal of Democracy' which made it one of the highest paying blue-collar cities in the US. In the words of Segrue, "Mid-twentieth-century Detroit embodied the melding of human labor and technology that together had made the United States the apotheosis of world capitalism." (p.19) This height of Fordist production makes the inevitable fall even more extreme.
:: 'Criss Crossed Conveyors' from the Ford River Rouge Plant - Charles Sheeler (1927) image via Art History Archive
As mentioned, the visitors of today's Detroit marvel at the industrial ruins and disaster porn, but at the time, people flocked to the city to see the massive technologies and industrial might at work, and mostly "they stood rapt as the twentieth century's premier consumer object, the automobile, rolled off the assembly lines by the dozens an hour." (p.19) It is hard to think of the spectacular model of modernity that Detroit once embodied, one that reshaped the city with a new form of 'industrial geography' which tied factories to suppliers and workers to homes with unprecedented efficiency.
The traces of grand boulevards from Woodward's L'Enfant-inspired plan of 1807
remained - fanning out in a radial pattern of wide avenues from the city center, which added to
the idea of speed and efficiency that has characterized Detroit, and the
automobile industry for decades. Much like Los Angeles being the embodiment of the auto-centric city, Detroit is the perfect model of Fordist urbanism at work - not just in the factories - driven by mass-production along with high union wages, and the accessibility of the blue-collar worker to live in a single-family house of their own - with a dearth of any sort of apartment of multi-family housing to accommodate lower-income or those not wealthy enough, or white enough, to buy houses.
The focus on single-family houses led to perpetual housing shortages - particularly when combined with a history of official and unofficial policies that prevented blacks from obtaining housing. Unlike many of the eastern cities where the geography was a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, Detroit was much more literally black and white, as Segrue mentions, "class and race became more important that ethnicity as a guide to the city's residential geography." (p.22) While it was understood as a "City of Homes" for most, the influx of black workers from the South, who came in the 'Great Migration', were met with a consistent range of discrimination and violence, as existing residents perceived in-migration as a threat to their community, starting in the 1920s and continuing all the way through the 1970s. As mentioned in Segrue:
"White neighborhoods, especially enclaves of working-class homeowners, interpreted the influx of blacks as a threat and began to defend themselves against the newcomers, first by refusing to see to blacks, then by using force and threats of violence, and finally establishing restrictive covenants to assure the homogeneity of neighborhoods." (p.24)
There were some inroads to employment in good jobs around WWII, driven by a tightening labor market, the coalitions of unions and civil rights groups, and some federal policies, which made sure that "blacks made significant gains in Detroit's industrial economy during the war." (p.27) There was still an undercurrent of racial tension, which played out in housing and employment, a continual topic that Segrue alludes to being a 'structural' racism that played out in Detroit, and were displayed in significant riots and other violence throughout the years, but that this didn't stop the influx of blacks coming into the city, leaving the Jim Crow south for something better. It's debatable if Detroit was much better.
The Time Bomb
The availability and quality of housing was poor for blacks - driven by a number of social and policy factors. While the New Deal had instilled a new ideology of opportunity for blacks - it had also instilled an ideology for current residents that the government would protect their property and the status quo. Thus the competing ideals of opportunity and protection played out in Detroit, and although, as seen previously, some gains were made - the majority of the wins came in maintenance of the status quo and protection from the new waves of poor, black residents.
As seen in the map below, there were very specific segregated neighborhoods that were predominately populated by blacks - in particularly the original Paradise Valley and West Side Neighborhoods (which had been an areas for wealthy blacks that had deteriorated), along with the wealthier blacks in Conant Gardens and the more distant Eight Mile-Wyoming area, where they had land for gardens to grow food, which became for some pioneering blacks, "their one opportunity, as they saw it, to own their own homes and rear their families." (p.39)
The geography of race was perpetuated by the real estate community as well, who were actively involved in the exclusion of blacks from housing. Another aspect was construction, with new houses rarely being built for blacks or in a price range that was suitable. As Segrue mentions, in "1951, on 1.15 percent of the new homes constructed in the metropolitan Detroit area were available to blacks." (p.43). Another major issue that shaped this geography in Detroit, and many other cities around the United States, was the concept of redlining. Maps were produced by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, informed by local real estate brokers and lenders, to rate the neighborhoods in cities according to a scale from A (green) to D (red). While ostensibly a methodology for determining investment risk, the process became a de facto method for exclusion, disenfranchisement, and continued disinvestment in the minority areas.
Black neighborhoods, even those with a small percentage of black residents, were given a rating of 'D', which was deemed hazardous and colored red (as seen in the unfortunately fuzzy map above, which shows significant portions of the downtown). I haven't been able to track down maps from Detroit - although they do exist for a number of cities - and tell as pretty sad tale of federally aided racism. The ratings kept out new loans for new construction or home repairs, furthering a cycle of disinvestment, as outlined by Segrue:
"Residents in areas rate 'C' and 'D' were unlikely to qualify for mortgages and home loans. Builders and developers, likewise, could expect little or no financial backing if they chose to building in such risky neighborhoods." (p.44)
When you factor in restrictive covenants (the actual and implied), and the work of redlining along with real-estate industry maintenance of status quo, it equated to an impossible position for the largest growing population of residents in Detroit to get adequate housing, which further fueled tensions. For a bit more context, here's a video about the Race Riots from Detroit 2020 offers a concise history on the topic:
The final element of the oppression of poor minority residents in Detroit came, as it did in many areas, through the disguise of urban renewal, in particular the construction of highways through 'slums' that cleared out substandard housing without replacing it with enough to handle what was lost, much less house the large numbers of new residents. From Segrue: "The most obvious problem with slum clearance was that it forced the households with the least resources to move at a time when the city's tight housing market could not accommodate them." (p.50)
This was exacerbated with landlords charging more rent (up to 35% more) for blacks for less housing, which, coupled with the lower wages and job opportunities, forced many to live in great numbers, and not have anything left over for maintenance. This further degraded already deteriorating stock, which further declined, and continued the narrative that some whites believed - that blacks would destroy neighborhoods. The cycle continued. Unlike some areas that built robust (if often misguided) public housing, the next chapter showed that Detroit, city of 'homes' had some similar issues with density, and a new-found Nimbyism which led to a slow provision of subsidized housing, which may have aided in softening some of the myriad impacts of the 1950s and 1960s.
Public Housing
The promise of the New Deal, in post-WWII era, was predicated on government intervention to solve the problems of the city. One of those things was to provide adequate housing for the poor, whether this be true building of community and opportunity, or the more commonly wielded tool of 'social engineering' to make better citizens. Through a number of acts, the US developed policy and funding for many types of affordable housing, complementing the already robust subsidies of single family home construction and highway building.
The trend toward 'modernist' totalitarian schemes emerged from this process of social engineering, embodied by the work of a group of professionals called the Citizens' Housing and Planning Council (CPHC), which took a mission of "improvement of the environmental conditions of Detroit's slums through the elimination of crowded, dirty, and substandard housing, and the construction of sanitary, well-lit, and well-ventilated public housing in its place." (p.61) This type of rhetoric smacks of much of public housing projects of the era, which provides housing, as Segrue mentions, that has "ameliorative effects on living conditions and would modify the behavior and character of urban residents... Public housing would also uplift the 'morale' of urban dwellers," which could happen through "social and individual improvement through orderly planning and urban redevelopment." (p.62)
The problem in Detroit, was that nobody seemed to want public housing, as it was fought almost everywhere by both whites, unions, real estate agents, developers and even some established black residents. The adjacency of even some black areas was problematic, and developers had to make deals with the FHA, such as the 1 foot thick, 6 foot high wall that separated the new development from the old - remnants of which still exist. This sort of approach reinforced the FHA's official policy, not of true equality, but as mentioned by Segrue, even with some of the more enlightened bureaucrats, "a separate but equal philosophy." (p.67)
:: Wall Separating Black from White - remnant - image via Detroit Fly
The official ideology of racial segregation couched in urban renewal also bled into the policies of the City Plan Commission (CPC), which continued the rhetoric of "an emerging program to create a totally planned metropolis, combining public housing with strictly regulated private development..." and the group began using zoning to start "composing a master plan to guide city and regional growth... for the 'reconstruction of Detroit's 'blighted' neighborhoods'..." (p.68) The use of condemnation and slum removal, and strategic placement of black neighborhoods aimed to 'clean up' areas and protect others from deterioration, but more often than not led to housing shortages for those most in need.
The contention over public housing locations was intense, with everyone agreeing that there was a chronic shortage, but no area wanting to be the location for housing to be built. It is understandable, as the inclusion of black neighborhoods, even those Federally-funded, would place these areas in danger of redlining, meaning that value for those living nearby would degrade, and their access to money for improvements and new construction would be significantly decreased. Many planned projects, such as the Sojourner-Truth housing project in Northeast Detroit, which was a planned 200 unit development opposed by whites as well as existing, establish blacks. The overt racism was sometimes couched in a patriotic fervor, "couched in the language of Americanism," as seen in the flags atop the blatant message below but also came with a hint of threatened violence, all with an aim, in the words of existing homeowners, to "preserve the racial and architectural homogeneity of their neighborhood." (p.78)
The Federal government flip-flopped multiple times on location and type of housing - at one point within a two week period switching from black to white, and back to black. The New Deal dichotomy of rights vs. existing protection was at play in many of these conversations as well, as mentioned by Segrue, while: "Acknowledging the 'moral and legal right' of blacks to adequate housing..." existing residents countered that they "had established a prior right to a neighborhood which we have built up through the years - a neighborhood which is entirely white and which we want kept white." (p.80) The government, with pressure from residents, unions, and other groups, implied redlining from real-estate agents, and continued white flight to the suburbs, often acquiesced to these demands, further creating a tension of high rent and little opportunity that continued to flare up in violence.
The venue of public housing debate became a political touchstone as well - with mayoral elections being decided not by the traditional means of party affiliation and union membership, but by black and white, specifically a candidates views of public housing. This conflict, as Segrue mentions, of "politics of home" versus the "politics of the workplace" was another interesting institutional element that made Detroit a large city with very little public housing compared to many other US cities.
As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the racial and social strife had already taken a toll on Detroit, even before deindustrialization, and that loss of industrial might that made the city the Arsenal of Democracy, will continue to play out in racial division, housing, and employment.
A class this term at Portland State involves a reading and conference on 'Shrinking Cities'. Led by professor Ellen Bassett, a group of a dozen students from PhD and Masters in Urban Studies and Urban and Regional Planning reading and discussing four diverse texts, along with a range of other writings on the subject.
:: Detroit Race Riots - 1967 - image via Brittanica
Our first book is "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit" by Thomas Segrue. Originally published in 1996, this book has won a number of awards for history, and continues to provide an overview of the connections between racial and economic inequality as played out in the post-WWII urban landscape of Detroit.
This is By no means a comprehensive overview of the subject, but the aim of the group is to discuss the social, economic, political, and spatial phenomena at work in a number of US Shrinking Cities, to better understand this issue. Stay tuned for some thoughts over coming weeks, and if you have suggested readings to include, that would be very welcome.
An interesting article from the Economist on 'The Wisdom of Crowds' echoes much of the seminal research of William Whyte (City), Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and others that have closely studied the behavior of pedestrians and other users of public spaces. The interplay of cultural habits that tells us to step right or left to avoid collisions on a busy street can lead to a certain inherent poetic 'choreography' when viewed. There are different theories on how these actions are coordinated, and the article focuses on new scientific methods for predicting and studying pedestrian movements.
As Jane Jacobs mentioned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities this urban realm is likened to a ballet:
"It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”
It was interesting, in this context, to remember my recent travels to Europe, namely London, where traffic on the roads occupies the left lane, but as mentioned in the article, there is not a correlation between this and pedestrian movement. While they mention that London follows pedestrians on the right, that is an oversimplification, as it doesn't necessarily follow, at least in my experience. Many people follow the walking to the left, which is culturally learned in the UK, mirroring the driving, but the influx on many non-locals that have their own rules often leads this to degenerate into chaos. Thus there is not a typical rule of thumb - and you are therefore required to be much more actively engaged in the surroundings to navigate successfully.
London Pavement Parkings - (image by Jason King)
As mentioned in the originally referenced article, culture is less important in this process as is habit and repetition: "Mehdi Moussaid of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, this is a behaviour brought about by probabilities. If two opposing people guess each other’s intentions correctly, each moving to one side and allowing the other past, then they are likely to choose to move the same way the next time they need to avoid a collision. The probability of a successful manoeuvre increases as more and more people adopt a bias in one direction, until the tendency sticks. Whether it’s right or left does not matter; what does is that it is the unspoken will of the majority."
The importance of this sort of study (sorry thought, as mentioned, this not a 'youngish field') has long been known in urban realms. It is being rediscovered by other sciences and disciplines (seems like everyone wants to study the city now!) such as physics, who are using modeling in the context of crowd safety, particularly in a more multi-cultural world, to better understand what has long been studied the old-fashioned way - by watching people in person or through video.
While thinking of people in similar terms of particles may be helpful, as people are governed by many rules - there is somewhat of a wildcard element in human behavoir as people act as "particles with a 'will'", doing sometimes unpredictable things and non-linear behaviors. The issues with modeling are obvious, when you take into account the sheer number of variables at play even in the most simple pedestrian-to-pedestrian interaction. The article mentions this in the context of a study between Indian and German pedestrians, where the direction is also complicated by cultural spatial rules as well:
"Trying to capture every element of pedestrian movement in an equation is horribly complex, however. One problem is allowing for cultural biases, such as whether people step to the left or the right, or their willingness to get close to fellow pedestrians. Trying to capture every element of pedestrian movement in an equation is horribly complex, however. One problem is allowing for cultural biases, such as whether people step to the left or the right, or their willingness to get close to fellow pedestrians. An experiment in 2009 tested the walking speeds of Germans and Indians by getting volunteers in each country to walk in single file around an elliptical, makeshift corridor of ropes and chairs. At low densities the speeds of each nationality are similar; but once the numbers increase, Indians walk faster than Germans. This won’t be news to anyone familiar with Munich and Mumbai, but Indians are just less bothered about bumping into other people."
It would be interesting to do a lit review of cultural spatial studies, building on the work of Hall, to see if these have been updated, and if we have learned anything new in the past 20 years, since The Hidden Dimension was published in 1990. The world has changed dramatically and is much more global, thus it makes sense that even this sort of revolutionary study, while still somewhat applicable, will have changed due to a changed world.
This goes as well to updating Whyte's classic video studies of public spaces (i.e. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces), which are great but extremely dated and not reflective of a much more culturally rich society. A screen shot of one of the videos shows a different environment than what exists even 20 to 30 years later. This doesn't mean his data are any less relevant, but that we must continue to engage in further study to learn more.
A research agenda that looks at these phenomena, how we use spaces, how we react and incorporate multiple cultural viewpoints, and more is vital to our continual understanding of proxemics, pedestrian movement, crowd dynamics, and more. This can be done by incorporation of more scientific modeling of typically non-urban disciplines, such as the complex modeling processes in physics. It is, to me, much more interesting to envision this study through updates of the seminal urban research studies, which would be a worthy endeavor in our ever globalizing world and our constantly diversifying cities.
This post originally appeared on THINK.urban on January 05, 2012.
The ideas at the time were somewhat nascent, and sort of hinted at the concept of adaptable, location-specific music responsive to place. This was reinforced by reading one of William Gibson's latest novels called 'Spook Country', which discusses the concept of 'locative media' within the storyline, which means media that is delivered "directly to the user of a mobile device dependent upon their location." Another thread was a tale of games of location-specific 'Urban Pacman' taking place in Portland - using the game-friendly layout of Ladd's Addition as a container.
An article from a few weeks back in the NY Times - "Central Park, the Soundtrack" takes this idea to an entirely new level. Bluebrain, a musical duo have created. The first of the series looked at the National Mall, and the second, of these 'locational' music pieces, 'Listen to the Light' provides an experiential soundtrack for Central Park. From the Times article:
"As you walk, new musical themes hit you every 20 or 30 steps, as if they
were emanating from statues, playgrounds, open spaces and landmarks... The themes layer over one another, growing in volume as you approach
certain points on the map and fading out as you move away. It’s a
musical Venn diagram placed over the landscape, and at any time you
might have two dozen tracks playing in your ears, all meshing and
colliding in surprising ways. The path you take determines what you
hear, and the biggest problem with what the composers call a
“location-aware album” is that you may get blisters on your feet trying
to hear it all."
The Venn diagram looks something like this, and the tracks reference GPS coordinates. A diagram or map of the overlay of different musical phrases, from the Bluebrain site:
You can get a taste for the 'classical' inspired work as well.
Definitely check out the slightly longer 'making of' video for "Listen to the Light" for more detail on the technical aspects. It is somewhat difficult to assess whether the piece is a success or not, divorced from context, but that might be the point. For those of us who have a constant soundtrack going through our head - which hits shuffle based on a word on a street sign or a sight of a sunset, it does lead one to think that there many possibilities that we are just scratching the surface.
Another interesting example mentioned in the article was GPS Beatmap: Planet as Control Surface, which uses location-specific positioning to mash-up musical phrases based on where you are. Check out a video of this in action here:
It's pretty exciting, even in these simple formats - and it isn't difficult to envision new radio stations that are location-driven, where users can select a genre, plug in headphones, and participate in an immersive, place-based experience customized to their own particular
A great little snapshot on urban serendipity from the NY Times that looks at the accidental 'curation' of spaces that the urban environment yields, such as the framed view from the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge. Perhaps the uniformity of the grid is part of the magic, as the NYT also talks about the 200th Anniversary of the Manhattan Grid, along with the exhibition at the Museum of the City. And speaking of paving here in Portland, local group Depave got some nice coverage on OPB for their continued work on rolling back pavement in the city. As for making money on the urban agriculture and gardens - a study in Vancouver, BC finds that it is still a challenge to make a living wage farming, even in the city. Perhaps we can lobby for urban farm subsidies?
Nate Berg at the Atlantic Cities sums up Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's year-long project to explore his city through its literature, and some of his conclusions on where we stand. As quoted in the Atlantic article:
"“What the books have suggested to me,” Hawthorne argues, “is that we really don’t have – and need – a new framework for understanding the city at this moment in its history as it undergoes this transition.”
A review of his most recent reading of 'Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space' can be found here - which is an interested exploration of the role of space, and the role of social status, on the way we interpret urban histories. Related, and probably not big news, but people are less enamored with the suburbs, and are re-urbanizing, in this case, Philadelphia along with living in more dense types of housing.
More on Occupy, with the recent flurry of Global and US occupations bringing into question the 'limits' of how public spaces are. As mentioned in the story:
"The Occupy Wall Street movement showed there are often limits to how long one can stay in the town square of a “free” state to express one’s opinion. Various kinds of force were used to get people out of New York’s Zuccotti Park."
An interesting article from The Dirt on the $50 million!!!!! dollars of planning documents and designs for the Orange County Great Park, which has failed to yield much in terms of output. It brings into question the time-scale on these massive endeavors, and how much needs to happen to create a 'park' in a traditional sense to satisfy some - while allowing space (and budgets) to evolve over decades.
Finally, a new competition from the Land Art Generator Initiative asks how renewable energy can be beautiful with a planned site at the Freshkills Park - which has a similar time-scale to the Great Park above. And Freshkills may be an apt model for Mexico City, who is planning to close their massive landfill... And for the squeamish, a new report from the National Research Council changes the tune of reclaimed wastewater (aka toilet to tap) from a 'option of last resort' to a viable strategy that poses no more health risks than other sources. Drink up!
Another round of Siftings from the past couple of days. Starting off with a couple of Occupy-related posts, including a great article from Saskia Sassen and Hans Haacke from Artforum entitled 'Imminent Domain'. The first sentence - "OCCUPYING IS NOT THE SAME as demonstrating..." points out a recent and annoying trend of calling any sort of protest an occupation. It diminishes the act of occupying to do so. Worth reading, but a snippet I will include:
"To occupy is to remake, even if temporarily, territory’s embedded and often deeply undemocratic logics of power, and to redefine the role of citizens, mostly weakened and fatigued after decades of growing inequality and injustice. Indeed, the occupations have revealed to what extent the reality of territory goes beyond its dominant meaning throughout the twentieth century, when the term was flattened to denote national sovereign territory."
The National discusses a competition for Egypt's Tahrir Square, particularly to provide a monument that is a "memorial competition to commemorate the actions of the revolution." Particularly, the article mentions, is to remember the estimated 846 people who died in the protests (yes, that was a real occupation). It points out also, that while in the US, we can claim public space, and also claim a measure of shared atrocity with the liberal use of baton and pepper spray to disperse crowds, we're still along way from bullets and grenades as a typical strategy, as is found in many parts of the world.
On a different note, Richard Florida, if anyone is still listening to him, has an article in the Atlantic on 'How the Crash Will Reshape America' which is worth a read, along with an interesting exploration on 'The Case for Congestion' - which argues for some slow-ness, but perhaps not to the degree of the scenarios that imagined a "City Without Its Public Transportation" and what that would mean for automobile gridlock.
An article from the NY Times 'Taking Parking Lots Seriously, as Public Spaces' includes some study from Eran Ben-Joseph, including some startling stats, such as that there are: "...500 million parking spaces in the country, occupying some 3,590 square miles, or an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined."
The article and slideshow (thanks NY Times for not allowing pic downloads!!!) - also yielded a gem from Lewis Mumford, which has definitely made the rounds on Twitter and Facebook:
"“As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, ‘The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.’"
And finally, from 'Growing Your Greens', an interesting Incredible Edible Public Garden in Irvine, California (with apologies for the host yelling all the time)... The title is a bit misleading, as it would be quite a feat to feed 200k of people with 7.5 acres. Enjoy.
Via Atlantic Cities, an interesting film from 1959 exploring the implications for sprawl... from the National Association of Home Builders and the Urban Land Institute. I particularly like the diagrams of the monocentric city towards polycentric city form in post WWII United States.
The solutions include planned unit developments, cluster developments, townhouses, culs-de-sac, separation of auto and pedestrian uses, loop streets, and circular streets are mentioned - all of which had/have merit - but are not a silver bullet to fix issues. Interestingly, have we actually come very far in the last 50+ years? Can planning solve these issues? As summed up in patriotic fervor:
"Planning alone is not the final answer to the crisis of our land. But without wise and far-sighted planning, there can be no answers. How wisely, or wastefully, we use the heritage of our land, is not solely the responsibility of the planner, the developer, the builder, the community official. It is the responsibility of all of us, who are the American community."
The solution - more research. Some things never change.
As an example, King mentions the Sierra Pacific Megapolitan Area, seen below as a large geographical area that extends from the San Francisco Bay area all the way into Western Nevada, around Reno. The region includes 27 counties and includes over 12.4 million people, and its expected to grow substantially in the next 30 years.
As mentioned in the article, the significance of the concept of megapolitan areas is to look more broadly at a larger scale, King, quoting Nelson, mentions that "regions can be more proactive in everything from transportation planning to economic strategies... to have people look at things a little differently, the whole rather than the parts."
While explicitly not a model for mega-regional government, there are some possibilities of what this might mean for regions by looking at larger areas. As mentioned by King, "It's too early to say whether the concept of megapolitan areas will catch on as a framework for government policy, much less in terms of how regular people define where they live."
The significant of megapolitan areas, thus is undetermined.
The overall ambiguity of the defining characteristics of a 'city' has led to a lot of questions related to city centers, sprawl, and other hybrid urban agglomerations like edge cities, exurbs, and the shift from urban area to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). This leads to a lot of diversity in definition (outlined in the SF Gate article) - including the largest megapolitan area (NY-Phil 33.9 million people) to the smallest, fastest growing (Las Vegas 2.4 million). While Vegas booms, the Steel Corridor of wester PA is creeping along slowly. In terms of diversity, not surprisingly, the Southern California region has the largest percentage of minorities (62.7%) and the Twin-Cities are the least diverse with 15.5% of minorities.
The terms megaregion, megalopolis, megapolitan area, while similar in nature, are somewhat different historically, spatially, and statistically, so it is worth a look at some of the designations. A map of megaregions shows the eleven areas in the United States as determined by the Regional Plan Association.
This differs somewhat from a more recent version of Megapolitan areas from a recent essay by Lang and Nelson on Places from Design Observer) They identify 10 megapolitan clusters that exist in 23 megapolitan areas that are similar but slightly different from those above.
The different terms, definitions, and geographical extents makes the concepts a bit difficult to parse, but in general terms, the areas are defined by a population of more than 10 million people that exist within a 'clustered network of cities' typically delineated through transportation corridors.
The new interpretation of Megapolitan area builds on earlier concepts to describe a more general 'transmetropolitan geography' which is typically thought of more commonly in larger, global areas such as China, Japan, Brazil - which include megaregions of 120 million (Hong Kong, Shenzen-Guangzhou), 60 million (Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe) and 43 million (Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo). While the concepts are similar, the scale of these new global areas are immense in comparison to the US.
Interestingly enough, the term has been used since the 1820s, and the conceptual usage of the concept of Megalopolis as a grouping of urban areas within a region dates back almost 100 years. This includes references by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1918) and Lewis Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1938). The most popularized recent usage was from 1950s and 60s, in the book on the Northeast United States by Jean Gottmann entitled 'Megalopolis' (1961).
More on this in subsequent posts, specifically additional information on Lang and Nelson's longer essay in Places, and a closer look at the book. Stay tuned.
An interesting article making some strange connections between the land of free spiritedness that is Burning Man, specifically the arrangement of the temporary settlement 'Black Rock City' with the ideology of New Urbanism. I can't think of two uniquely different mind-sets and approaches, so find the connection to be somewhat comical - but am keeping an open mind. So read for yourself... and determine perhaps if that next vacant town square surrounded by walk-up townhouses would benefit from an iconic super human sculptural icon that regularly is set aflame? Maybe it would be a Waldheim effigy? Who knows.
"One of the many ways in which Black Rock City epitomizes thoughtful city planning, Mr. Garrett said in a 2010 interview, is that people are responsible for managing their own waste. (“Leave no trace” is a Burning Man mantra.) Another is that cars are sidelined, thanks to a layout that makes walking and biking far less onerous than driving. In that approach Mr. Garrett had allies among the New Urbanists, the town planners sometimes labeled reactionary for promoting quaint enclaves like Seaside, Fla. He also had a soul mate in Janette Sadik-Khan, New York City’s transportation commissioner, who is responsible for closing some streets to vehicular traffic"
A formative source in thinking about indeterminant spaces is Terrain Vague, a 1995 essay by Spanish Architect Ignasi de Sola-Morales. The essay starts with a discussion of the idea of photography, which is mentioned by the author as vital to our understanding, particularly through photomontage and their inventive juxtaposition of forms, aiding our ability to explain the urban realm. Conversely, with its ability to frame and 'edit' the urban conditions - resulting in a disconnect of image from reality. As mentioend by de Sola-Morales, "When we look at photographs, we do not see cities - still less with photomontages. We see only images, static framed prints." (109) From this jumping-off point of photography comes the 'non-space' of terrain vague, as defined by the author:
"Empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place seems to subjugate the eye of the urban photographer. Such urban space, which I will denote by the French expression terrain vague, assumes the status of fascination, the most solvent sign with which to indicate what cities are and what our experience of them is." (109)
The etymology of the definition is explored, due to the lack of a clear translation into English. First, the concept of terrain (as opposed to the concept of land) is more expansive, including more spatial connotations and the idea of a plot of land fit for construction, meaning that it has more direct ties to the urban. Vague, on the other hand - has ties to a range of ideas. From German 'woge' which is tied to the movement of seas - we get "movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation." From French, the roots lie in 'vacuus', which yields connotations of vacancy, emptiness, and availability. Another meaning is derived from the Latin 'vagus' which is most closely related to the origins in landscape urbanism thinking giving "the sense of 'indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, and uncertain.'" (110)
Thus the dual concept of a plot of land defined by indeterminacy is the key to understanding of terrain vague, which has both a spatial as well as a social connection - defined by what it is, but that being specifically defined by how the space is used. As de Sola Morales mentions, these become "spaces as internal to the city yet external to its everyday use. In apparently forgotten places, the memory of the past seems to predominate over the present." (110)
These spaces have an innate duality - due to their marginalization, they have the sense of externality ot the order and security of the city making them alluring as a way of out the typically homogenized urban realm, meaning they become "both a physical expression of our fear and insecurity and our expectation of the other, the alternative, the utopian, the future." (111) Identified as a certain 'strangeness' which has been cataloged throughout urban history as tied to the social dislocation of our shift to urban dwellers - most notably captured in Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' and our evolution to the blase cosmopolitan.
This is captured by de Sola-Morales as 'estrangement' which becomes the formative construction of the terrain vague: "The photographic images of terrain vague are territorial indications of strangeness itself, and the aesthetic and ethical problems that they pose embrace the problematics of contemporary social life. What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition?" Thus these become fertile ground for artists whom "seek refuge in the margins of the city precisely when the city offers them an abusive identity, a crushing homogeneity, a freedom under control. The enthusiasm for these vacant spaces - expectant, imprecise, fluctuating - transposed to the urban key, reflects our strangeness in front of the world, in front of our city, before ourselves." (112)
Terrain Vague is a difficult concept - being essentially 'non-design'- but is also powerful in its ability to theorize on the margins of the ordered world in which we reside. On the difficult side, the actions of a designer is somewhat in opposition to the unstructured configuration of these spaces. As de Sola Morales mentions: "the role of the architect is inevitably problematic. Architecture's destiny has always been colonization, the imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal." (112) This innate desire to transform disorder into order leads to a catch-22 in the employment of design 'agency' within these structures, as mentioned in the text:
"When architecture and urban design project their desire onto a vacant space, a terrain vague, they seem incapable of doing anything other than introducing violent transformations, changing estrangement into citizenship, and striving at all costs to dissolve the uncontaminated magin of the obsolete into the realism of efficacy." (112)
While design is about form, there is still plenty of potential in exploring the concept of terrain vague, as it offers the opportunity to give shape (both spatial and social) to an existing urban phenomenon of indeterminancy, tapping into the city inhabitants continual seeking of "forces instead of forms, for the incorporated instead of the distant, for the haptic instead of the optic, the rhizomatic instead of the figurative." (112) It is still unclear how we use this, but further investigation should yield the possibilities of learning from this existing urban condition - not trying to recreate it, which is inevitably an exercise in futility, but looking at the ability to allow disorder, not fall into the trap of modernism in trying to rationalize and organize all of the spaces within a narrowly defined set of uses. Can it work? de Sola Morales posits that:
"Today, intervention in the existing city, in its residual spaces, in its folded interstices can no longer be either comfortable or efficacious in the manner postulated by the modern movement's efficient model of the enlightened tradition. How can architecture act in the terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason? Undoubtedly, through attention to continuity: not the continuity of the planned, efficient, and legitimized city, but of the flows, the energies, the rhythms established by the passing of time and the loss of limits... we should treat the residual city with a contradictory complicity that will not shatter the elements that maintain its continuity in time and space." (113)
More on this as we tie together threads of the 'terrain vague' with the ideas of 'heterotopias' and other models of indeterminate 'otherspace' in the urban context. In classic urbanistic inquiry, the field of study has been identified, theorized, and classified - the translation of this into actions of architecture, urban design, planning, and landscape architecture - is another, more difficult jump. But then again, that's the fun, no?
In 1995, Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau published 'S,M,L,XL', one in a line of oversized volumes so fondly disseminated by the Dutch. Amazon mentions the work as "extraordinary, massive, and mind-boggling 1,300-page book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city--and complex illustrations..." giving shape to a mixed bag of visuals and texts on the work of OMA/Koolhaas and their speculations on the city. One short essay, 'Whatever Happened to Urbanism?' by Koolhaas is fixed into the literature of landscape urbanism, quoted by many - specifically a key, oft- mentioned fragment:
"If there is to be a 'new urbanism' it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infra-structure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions - the reinvention of psychological space." (123)
The term 'irrigation of territories with potential' always struck me as akin to pissing in the wind - perhaps just in its alliteration, but as a phrase it does resonate with many of the formative elements of LU theory - particularly the idea of uncertainty, hybridization, infrastructure, and process above form. The other important idea that fascinates me is the concept of 'urbanism' when realized in Euro-centric terms as 'study', whereas Koolhaas definitely considers urbanism as a more active endeavor, stating in the context of rapid urbanization, that "urbanism, as a profession, has disappeared at the moment when urbanization everywhere - after decades of constant acceleration - is on its way to establishing a definitive, global 'triumph' of the urban condition?" (122)
This demise of the urban is rooted in the reactions and rejections in the professional and educational realms to the mid-century pinnacle of high-modernism - which has caused a retreat into nostalgia. Koolhaas considers the irony of this as the current form and idea of a city has totally shifted - becoming "beyond recognition," summed up as "'The city no longer exists." Thus the clinging to nostalgia comes at the exact time when the classic idea of the city, the context urbanism, was snuffed out by rampant urbanization that erased our understanding and approaches to the fuzzy realm of urban/suburban/hinterland that currently exists. Koolhaas claims then:
"For urbanists, the belated rediscovery of the virtues of the classical city at the moment of their definitive impossibility many have been the point of no return, [the] fatal moment of disconnection, disqualification." (122)
The result is that urbanism is gone, replaced with architecture... creating a gap in the overall understanding of the city beyond that of the architectural object. This focus on architecture "exploits and exhausts the potential that can be generated finally only by urbanism, and that only the specific imagination of urbanism can invent and renew. The death of urbanism - our refuge in the parasitic security of architecture - creates an immanent disaster: more and more substance is grafted on starving roots." (123)
While I would say there has been a re-emergence of urbanism since the mid-nineties (albeit an urbanism confused with urban design and planning), the overall idea of an urbanism project is still valid - and the resultant current dialogue/discussion is vital and gets to the root of non-design urbanism. As mentioned by Koolhaas, "Redefined, urbanism will not only, or mostly, be a profession, but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what exists." (123) Thus,
"To survive, urbanism will have to imagine a new newness... We have to imagine 1,001 other concepts of city; we have to take insane risks; we have to dare to be utterly uncritical; we have to swallow deeply and bestow forgiveness left and right." (123)
This is what we lost in the disaster of the modern project, the ability to think big, and perhaps fail, while trying to deal with this unprecedented urban condition. This has left us with small ideas tiptoeing around the crisis under the rubric of safe interventions or tepid theorizations. The final words then ring true: "What if we simply declare that there is no crisis - redefine our relationship with the city not as its makers but as its mere subjects, as its supporters? More than ever, the city is all we have." (123)
The next essay from the Landscape Urbanism Reader is by David Grahame Shane, entitled 'The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism'. This essay builds on Waldheim's essay and further elaborates on the origins of the theory - with a broad take on the historical foundations and precedents around landscape urbanism as mentioned in the introductory text: “Shane surveys the growing body of literature attendant to landscape urbanism, while tracing the institutions and individuals implicated in the discourse, especially as they relate to the disciplinary formations and discourses of urban design.” (17)
As far as defining landscape urbanism, Shane mentions that the concept "has recently emerged as a rubric to describe the design strategies resulting in the wake of traditional urban forms.” (58) and echoes Waldheim in describing it as encompassing: "the practices of many designers for who landscape had replaced architectural form as the primary medium of citymaking. This understanding of decentralized post-industrial urban form highlighted the leftover void spaces of the city as potential commons.” (57-58) Furthering this defintiion that provides a way out of the current methodologies of urban design practice.
“Landscape urbanists want to continue the search for a new basis of a performative urbanism that emerges from the bottom up, geared to the technological and ecological realities of the postindustrial world… implies an opportunity open urban design out beyond the current rigid and polarized situation to a world where the past building systems and landscape can be included as systems within urban design.” (65)
Shane mentions this in terms of creating new "recombinations and hybridizations, liberating the urban design discipline from the current, hopeless, binary opposition of past and present, town and country, in and out." (65) but does mention that although filled with potential as noted above, "All of landscape urbanism’s triumphs so far have been in such marginal and ‘unbuilt’ locations.” (62) This is another common refrain from critics of landscape urbanism, and it is worth noting that the ideas of contemporary urbanism and its potential solutions are very different in distant open spaces as opposed to dense urban fabric, which is valid, but also misses the point that the theory is attempting to address this situation, not, as many posit, blindly accepting sprawl as a given and deciding to operate within the residual post-industrial or generic Koolhaasian fields of landscape within the periphery. Rather there is a residual fabric of corridors, edges, and other surfaces that can be re-engaged within this ideology.
The precise operational dynamic of works of landscape urbanism is one thing - but to move beyond this and think of ways in which the concepts that interweave into practice is a different approach altogether. The landscape urbanist project, if you would call it such, is addressing all of this (hence the term distiguished from the suburban), and Shane does explain that “The recent discourse surrounding landscape urbanism does not yet begin to address the issue of urban morphologies or the emergence of settlement patterns over time. The problems of this approach is its amnesia and blindness to preexisting structures, urban ecologies, and morphological patterns.” and concludes that “Landscape urbanists are just beginning to battle with the thorny issue of how dense urban forms emerge from landscape and how urban ecologies support performance spaces.” (63)
This essay is way to dense to capture in any detail, but does offer some thought provoking historical origins of theory spanning the last century. The change in urban form and dynamics through this time period are exp
ressed by 'decompression', evolving from the ideas of Post-Fordist modes of production, deindustrialization leading to shrinking cities, and the resultant postmodern organization that "became obvious in the 1990s with the proliferation of sprawling cities, gated enclaves, residential communities, megamalls, and theme parks.” (59)
This context of contemporary urbanism is best captured by the provocatively wonderful 'City as an Egg' diagram from Cedric Price, which contrast three city morphologies "traditional, dense, ‘hard-boiled egg’ city fixed in concentric rings of development… the ‘fried egg’ city, where railways stretched the city’s perimeter in accelerated linear space-time corridors out into the landscape, resulting in a star shape… and the postmodern ‘scrambled egg city,’ where everything is distributed evenly in small granules or pavilions across the landscape in a continuous network.” (64)
A wide array of projects are included as examples. Some are more obvious or oft-mentioned, such as the Parc de la Villette, Downsview, and Freshkills competitions, and also the East River Competition conducted by the Van Alen Institute. There are some new ones, includingWest Market Square by West 8 (1994) which is a space owned, maintained and programmed by the city, but "which is also free at times to be occupied by local people of all ages, under the surveillance of cameras and local police.” (60) marking a new example of heterotropic space. The New Town Competition entry from Koolhaas/OMA from 1987 is another precedent where the residential form is shaped by, in the words of Corner, "linear voids of nondevelopment." (60) hinting at the concept of privileged site over architectural form.
Other examples include the unbuilt Greenport Harborfront project in Long Island (1997), which is an example of “the concept of ‘performative’ urbanism based on preparing the setting for programmed and unprogrammed activities on common land.” (59) which is reflective of some of the later work from Field Operations as well. A built example of the idea, in a more architectural and site scale context, is the sculptural Osaka Ocean Liner Terminal by FOA, where the architects "turn the concept of the green roof into a dynamic, flowing, baroque parkland setting… Pier and park, two previously separate urban morphologies, are hybridized so as to become inseparable.” (65)
Shane references an even more extensive list of references, which provide some great historical precedents. Many of these cover basic historical urbanism, such as the work of Kostof (The City Shaped, The City Assembled), history of the Western/US landscape by Slater and Conzen, and early 20th century writings on garden cities from Howard and regionalism, specifically 'Cities in Evolution' by Patrick Geddes from 1915. Other writings include later writings of Lynch, Rowe, as well as McHarg's 'Design with Nature' and shifts to more contemporary discussions from Harvey and Soja for exploration of postmodern urbanism, writings from Guy Debord 'The Society of the Spectacle' from 1995 and the explorations by Garreau of the edge-city phenomenon from 1991.
:: Tyson's Corner Edge City
A fundamental aspect discussed by Shane is the connection to landscape ecology, specifically the work of Forman (Landscape Mosaics) and Forman & Godron (Landscape Ecology) and mentioning that its strength "is the consideration of the geographical landscape and the ecological cause-effect network in the landscape.”(61) The connections of landscape ecology and its roots in Europe are important due to the differing relations between nature and culture (rather than just dealing with landscape sans humans). As Shane elaborates:
"European land management principles merged with post-Darwinian research on island biogeography and diversity to create a systematic methodology for studying ecological flows, local biospheres, and plant and species migrations conditioned by shifting climatic and environmental factors (including human settlements.” (61)
Finally, the essays captures some of the more recent writings tied closely to LU theory, mentioning 'Stalking Detroit' (2001), 'Mississippi Floods' by Mathur & da Cunha (2000), 'Reclaiming the American West' by Berger (2002), 'Sub-urbanism and the Art of Memory' by Marot (2003), and 'Recovering Landscape' edited by Corner and published in 1999 - which i would consider a close precedent to the currrent discussion. Stalking Detroit is also an important contribution, offering essays by Waldheim and Corner and provides context, within the prominent shrinking city model of Detroit for a changing city typology. "After Ford' by Schumacher and Rogner, “provides a most convincing explanation for the relation between modern urbanism and Fordist economic imperatives, as well as the surreal spectacle of decay and abandonment found today in many North American industrial cities.” (57)
The work in Stalking Detroit, although unbuilt, provides some examples of potential operational methods of landscape urbanism. One project discussed was Waldheim's 'Decamping Detroit', which illustrates a four stage process for recolonization of space in the shrinking city, including "Dislocation (disconnection of services); erasure (demolition and jumpstarting the native landscape ecology by dropping appropriate seeds from the air ); absorption (ecological reconstitution of part of the Zone with woods, marshes, and streams); and infiltration (the recolonization of the landscape with heteropic, villagelike enclaves.” (59)
This context of deindustrialization and surburban sprawl is a consistent theme, moving away by necessity from the modernist planning ideology and including a different reading of the city, focus on urban morphology, activated with new strains of thinking from landscape ecology with a goal, as explained by Shane: “A determination not to accept the readymade formulas of urban design, whether ‘New Urbanist’ or ‘generic’ urbanist megaforms a la Koolhaas.” (64) The key this is a reversal of normal processes, which "opens the way for a new hybrid urbanism, with dense clusters of activity and the reconstitution of the natural ecology, starting a more ecologically balanced, inner-city urban form in the void.”(59)
Check out as well a longer version of this article from the Harvard Design Magazine (pdf) and I would highly recommend 'Recombinant Urbanism' from 2005 for an exhaustive study of urban modelling processes.
Explorations in landscape architecture and urbanism, with a focus on aligning theory with practice.
Jason King is a landscape architect and Principal of TERRA.fluxus in Portland, Oregon, and currently is in the doctoral program at Portland State University in Urban Studies.
I am happy to report that a recent essay was published in 'Atlantis' Magazine, which is published by Polis and collects writings that make "...the link between students,
academics and professionals besides the Polis activities. This magazine
is our medium to keep you as member up to date about everything going on
in the urbanism & landscape architecture world. The issue 22.4 discusses concepts around the 'Urban Landscape' and features contributions from a wide range of authors.
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