My fascination with history and place is no secret. While i am intrigued with urban history in many forms, there's always a desire for a connection with the place you inhabit. Typically this fascination comes via maps, which have been well documented, but the timeline of the past 150 years plus of Portland is worth a bit of investment. For folks on the go, there's also an app that highlights historical site - prepared by the Architectural Heritage Center. Also a new site, WhatWasThere, is a crowd-sourced version that allows folks to upload history photos of their places.
In addition, there are a number of other sources that augmented by a number of great resources that are provided by city and other historical society archives. Each has some overlap but occupies a unique and often personal niche for the blogger and site owner - to scratch their particular history itch, and all make for some great information.
A veritable decoupage of historical imagery awaits at Portland History - a no-frills site that organizes images, postcards, and a few words - sorted into categories like streets, amusement parks, A good shortcut is to go the site map, which gives some links to the categories - but just randomly moving around the site isn't a bad idea either.
Council Crest, the Dreamland of Portland, Oregon
Lost Oregon is a great example of an engaging history tour, albeit typically focused on architecture and riddled with some really bad theme ideas like this one. The site is simple and delves into some more details about some of the areas, buildings, and locations - which augments what is somewhat visually based on other sites.
A spinoff of Lost Oregon writer is PDX: Then/Now which juxtaposes historic and current photos of buildings and places. Some show destruction or evolution, and some, such as the Union Bank Building in Downtown, are eerily similar over 40 years later.
Vintage Portland is another site 'exploring portland's past', through "...photographs, postcards, illustrations, advertisements, etc. ... It’s not a history lesson, it’s not an architectural critique. It’s a
forum for displaying photos of the city’s past, to show how we lived,
what we’ve lost (for good or bad) through progress and just to enjoy
some wonderful camera work."
I particularly appreciate the 'mystery' posts - which show a building, corner, streetscape - with a question to help find where the site is. Sometimes it's to fill in a missing link to an archival photo, but other times it becomes more of a game. The context over time is fascinating evolution - and really highlights the impermanence/permanence of the urban realm. This shot of MLK @ Ainsworth from the north - replace Texaco with Starbucks (old fuel/new fuel?) and Gilmore with Popeyes (old grease/new grease?).
Cafe Unknown is a new one for
me, but author Dan Haneckow pulls you in with compelling history (more
text than other sites) along with some good images. A recent post on Mark Twain in Portland is a good read, and some of the trivial pursuits are great - like Will- vs. Wall- for our fair river (which subsequently ended up 'Willamette') are nuggets of pure gold. Haneckow is a true historical writer - with the requisite head shots of historical figures quoted... along with some really solid writing and research. These walking tour images were pretty interesting finds - along with the story of a missing sculpture found. This stuff is priceless - and firmly about our place.
Check all of these resources out - It is true - you will be sucked in for a few hours/days/weeks - and might come out forever changed. I feel like a landscape or at least urbanism oriented history site wouldn't be a bad endeavor - if someone is inclined to collaborate - look me up. But the caveat on these sites, and historical maps, photos, and primary materials - it's addictive. Don't say i didn't warn you.
The recent event for GOOD Ideas for Cities happened last week in Portland, and generated some great dialogue. I was also on one of the teams that presented. A short recap.
"Each team was issued a challenge proposed by a local urban leader. At
the event, the creative teams will present their solutions to their
assigned challenge, and the urban leaders will join them onstage for a
brief Q&A with GOOD Ideas for Cities editor Alissa Walker." Teams included international talent from Wieden + Kennedy and Ziba Design, as well as local groups Sincerely Interested, THINK.urban, ADX, and the Official Manufacturing Company, all tackling some pressing (and not so pressing) urban ideas.
The event was held at Ziba's beautiful new HQ building in the Pearl District, and the sold-out event had some great people and conversations. As you can see the packed house (including Mayor Sam Adams) is checking out Alissa from GOOD's intro, and had some great energy for the various groups.
My evolving side project THINK.urban, under development as a non-profit with fellow PSU Grad Students Allison Duncan and Katrina Johnston, was one of the teams, as mentioned above. We've been slamming away on ideas for six weeks, and presented our ideas for world-class bike infrastructure, working from a challenge from Bikeportland.org's Jonathan Maus).
"CHALLENGE (from BikePortland.org editor Jonathan Maus): How
can we create a major new bikeway that helps make bicycling as visible,
safe, convenient, and pleasant for as many people as possible?
IDEAS (from PSU grad student nonprofit THINK.Urban): Take a cue from Europe and build two-way cycletracks
on Portland's biggest streets. The two-way lanes would be separated
from cars on streets like Sandy, Broadway, and Hawthorne, by a grassy
median. "Prioritize bikes on the same level as cars. People are tired of
looking at Europe. We want to see these things here now."
We were really happy with the ideas that were developed, honored to be in such great company, and looking forward to seeing this new bike infrastructure take root. More on the ideas will be posted at THINK.urban, and I'll link them back here when they do.
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.
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.
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
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.
Cross Posting from THINK.urban (12/20/11): A simple variation on the biking infographic from yesterday, this animated version from GOOD shows how Portland leads in the bike wars, just barely, between US cities for percentage of commuters by bike.
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.
Hear this transit authorities, we need more of these in the urban realm... the 'Transfer Accelerator' is real life chutes and ladders, in this case a slide as a bypass to crowded stairway at the train station of Utrecht Overvecht designed by Utrecht-based firm HIK Ontwerpers. Function and whimsy. Gotta love it.
An interesting competition I am ruminating on proposing for, The Greatest Grid - from the Architectural League of New York along with the Museum of the City of New York - seeks ideas related to the grid and to reflect on the role of the grid, now 200 years old, impacts and shapes New York, and how it has and will continue to shape the city. Some background (and more on the site):
"On the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for New York, the foundational document that established the Manhattan street plan from Houston Street to 155th Street, the Architectural League invites architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and other design professionals to use the Manhattan street grid as a catalyst for thinking about the present and future of New York. For two centuries, the Manhattan street grid has demonstrated an astonishing flexibility to accommodate the architectural gestures and urban planning theories of successive generations of architects, urban designers, private developers, and city officials. Given its capacity for reinvention, how might the Manhattan grid continue to adapt and respond to the challenges and opportunities–both large and small–that New York faces now and into the future?"
Sort of open-ended, but the grid is such a powerful and contentious concept in both urban form (such as these studies on Planetizen here and here) and indeed the pattern of settlement for the western US. While New York was not the first city to be 'gridded' it seems a fitting context for exploration of an idea - one that offers some interesting avenues for exploration beyond the Big Apple. Coupled with some recent reading on Sanderson's work on Mannahatta Project - there could be some exciting potential overlaps/influences of the grid and nascent ecology of the island.
While familiar with the concept of the flâneur, the inquistive wanderer, or "...detached pedestrian observer of a metropolis, a gentleman stroller of city streets". Reading After the City last night, Lars Lerup, in discussing the idea of the 'speed' of the modern metropolis, made a passing reference to a 19th century custom of using a turtle to set the pace for the observer. I was intrigued.
:: walking the turtle - mixed media oil by michele maule - via etsy
"There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room… Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them."
Another reference on One-Way Street - expands on this in the post on f 'A Turtle on a Leash':
"The second development in urbanism leading to the rise of flâneurie was the construction of the Paris arcades in the early nineteenth century. The arcades offered a respite from the bustling crowd outside. Dandies began to frequent the fashionable arcades, taking in the sights and offering themselves up as spectacles in their own right. Around 1839, Benjamin reports, it was fashionable to walk through the arcades with a turtle on a leash in order to enforce the slow pace really determined looking required."
The concept of speed in our modern city makes one appreciate the idea of a pace-car to offset the rapidity of our contemporary life. This includes the physical (high speed rail, bus rapid transit, more horsepower, higher speed limits), as well as the virtual (rapid access to information via rss, web, smart phones, wi-fi) make just sitting (or strolling) and observing somewhat of a novelty.
A recent exercise in a class on research methods reinforced that for me - by sitting in a space (namely a local plaza here in Portland) for three separate occasions to merely 'observe' and take notes was jarring in its simplicity. I wasn't counting or doing anything qualitative, merely going for a rich description of activity and use of space. The experience made me think of what we miss in our fast-paced lifestyle in car windows, or even on bike or just walking 'to get somewhere'. Opening oneself up to observation at a slow(er) speed is invigorating and the polarity of our We stare at computers, magazines, books, or other media, but when the subject is the city (urbanism), it is easy to forget this isn't a detached idea, hypothesis, or theory - but something right outside your door.
An interesting new competition announced recently entitled Network Reset: Rethinking the Chicago Emerald Necklace, An international competition organized by MAS Studio & Chicago Architectural Club
which asks respondents: "...to look at the urban scale and propose a framework for the entire boulevard system as well as provide answers and visualize the interventions at a smaller scale that can directly impact its potential users. Through images, diagrams and drawings we want to know what are those soft or hard, big or small, temporary or permanent interventions that can reactivate and reset the Boulevard System of Chicago."
I'm a little perplexed by the new trend of competitions that have a 30 day turnaround between announcement and due date - as it seems to. Still - I'm intrigued, as it seems to be an interesting problem worth pursuing. Registration is open, and entries due February 21 - so get moving now.
I'm really glad that Strange Maps featured the interesting (albeit never realized) notion of John Wesley Powell's watershed-based approach to defining political boundaries in his 1890 'Map of the Arid Region of the United States'. The concept reframes the Jeffersonian national grid, using drainage districts as "the essential units of government, either as states or as watershed commonwealths".
Some further information: "Powell was convinced that only a small fraction of the American West was suitable for agriculture (3). His Report proposed irrigation systems fed by a multitude of small dams (instead of the few huge ones in operation today) and state borders based on watershed areas. The bulk of the arid regions should be reserved for conservation and low-intensity grazing. But other interests were at work; the railway companies lobbied for large-scale settlement and agricultural development."
Just imagine the differing political geography of a West that is defined through natural boundaries of topography and hydrology, and what implications While Powell's emphasis was on agriculture, imagine the different ways this would have allowed for looking at urbanization in the relatively dryland west that would have resulted through looking at availability of water. Would Los Angeles and Phoenix be the same as they are today?
The concept obviously was a radically different approach to the orthagonally based, Jeffersonian approach in the late 18th Century, now continued to be managed by the Bureau of Land Management through the Public Land Survey System (a good resource of info as well from from National Atlas).
Some pertinent history, from the site: "Originally proposed by Thomas Jefferson, the PLSS began shortly after the Revolutionary War, when the Federal government became responsible for large areas west of the thirteen original colonies. The government wished both to distribute land to Revolutionary War soldiers in reward for their service, as well as to sell land as a way of raising money for the nation. Before this could happen, the land needed to be surveyed. The Land Ordinance of 1785 which provided for the systematic survey and monumentation of public domain lands, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787which established a rectangular survey system designed to facilitate the transfer of Federal lands to private citizens, were the beginning of the PLSS."
The remnant of this being the rather 'straight-edge' development of political boundaries for delineating terrain that we live with today - the only diversions being for river edges that divide states, mostly expressed in the Montana/Idaho and somewhat less in the Washington/Oregon borders.
Drilling down into some of the smaller scale patterns, it's easy to see the disconnect between the political 'grid' and the underlying hydrology at work. A map of Kent County Michigan (although not of the west) illustrates this point, with the clash of political delineation over the organic, dendritic patterning of hydrology on the landscape.
My favorite example of course, growing up in North Dakota where one is intimately connected to the Jeffersonian grid, is the use of the 6x6 mile township system dividing land into an individual square mile pattern to develop a road system that literally etches gravel pathways throughout every corner of the state (allowing a significant amount of public access to territory via ca, ostensibly for access to farmland). It's virtually possible to zig-zag your way from one end of the state to another. It's also interesting to note, even with a seemingly barren flat landscape, the subtle patterns of water (creeks and potholes) on the land (more on this later as I sat staring at Google Earth closeups for about an hour, mesmerized).
:: image via Google Maps
The grid of course, cannot stay pure (even in the topographically flat areas), and it's funny after miles of arrow straight country roads to encounter the grid shift (scene of many a lonely automotive faux pas on a snowy day). These shifts, beyond the topographic, offer a more telling idea of the difficulties of a grid as a pure form on the larger landscape.
:: image via Google Maps
This idea, in a different scale, was inspirational for the conceptualizing of 'Neighborsheds' or neighborhood-based watersheds - that was the topic of my ASLA National Conference talk in 2006. More on this soon, once I dig out the materials - something I've wanted to revisit. Thanks to John Wesley Powell, although unsuccessful, in planting a seed of bioregional planning and boundary making, well before it was popular.
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.
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