Charles R. Wolfe's Blog: myurbanist (Chuck Wolfe's Blog), page 3

learning from a one-stop, urban epic–and why

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Spoiler alert: I love epic stories with universal meaning for varied audiences around the world. In sum, that is why I think Jonathan F.P. Rose‘s new book will become a must-read classic. And, if 400-pagers are not your style, it’s at worst a well-written, must-browse wonder, with relevant lessons for us all.

Rose is a real estate developer, philanthropist and fine arts patron with prominent New York roots, and holds  a graduate degree in regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania. His book, The Well-Tempered City, captures a life’s worth of experience and thinking, and his seven years of applied work on the book is readily apparent. He has done what many of us aspire to do, and translated experience into broad-based, focused lessons about the potential of our cities. He shows what we can achieve if we avoid discord, and align towards our latent human abilities to coordinate and mutually address inevitable change.

Rose’s inspirational theme is Johann Sebastian Bach’s then-novel, 18th century system of tuning musical instruments in The Well-Tempered Clavier.  He takes Bach’s premise of aligning human ideals with natural harmony, and applies it to urban progress and potential such as greening cities today.

I recently caught up with Rose in Seattle and tested my surmise that even those who prefer the short length of a tweet should immerse themselves in Rose’s ideas.  Why? First, current trends within cities tend to proceed independently and without context, which complicates our ability to converse holistically, and carry out solutions. Second, our state of civility is sorely lacking, and we need new ways to do urban business amid complicating global trends.  I was not disappointed; in our conversation Rose illustrated how The Well-Tempered City presents a baseline to address both of these concerns.

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He jumped quickly, with excitement, to a Portland Sustainability Institute (now “Ecodistrict‘)  graphic (reproduced above) that he often uses in presentations.  With read-the-city enthusiasm learned from his brother-in-law, architect/urbanist Peter Calthorpe, Rose explained Portland residents’ aspirations for a green, accessible and safe city, with places where people will want to spend their time. 

But here’s a pleasant caveat: Rose’s points stem not from a developer’s “green-washing,” but from well-studied explanations in the book about humans, and how they are wired, dating from our common ancestors who evolved millions of years ago.

After reading The Well-Tempered City, and speaking at length with Rose, I emerged with excitement and optimism, because with simple attention to his humanistic base, and concepts of vision, coherence and compassion, I saw how idealism and implementation merged. As a developer, Rose applied “the developer’s test” to his book’s ideas and found them workable—and so do I.

With a volume full of implementation examples, it is easy to understand why. His key paragraph from the Introduction—also already reproduced in other online excerpts and feature articles—is worth repeating:

Imagine a city with Singapore’s social housing, Finland’s public education, Austin’s smart grid, the biking culture of Copenhagen, the urban food production of Hanoi, Florence’s Tuscan regional food system, Seattle’s access to nature, New York City’s arts and culture, Hong Kong’s subway system, Curitiba’s bus rapid transit system, Paris’s bike-share program, London’s congestion pricing, San Francisco’s recycling system, Philadelphia’s green stormwater program, Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon River restoration project, Windhoek’s wastewater recycling system, Rotterdam’s approach to living with rising seas, Tokyo’s health outcomes, the happiness of Sydney, the equality of Stockholm, the peacefulness of Reykjavík, the harmonic form of the Forbidden City, the market vitality of Casablanca, the cooperative industrialization of Bologna, the innovation of Medellín, the hospitals of Cleveland, and the livability of Vancouver. Each of these aspects of a well-tempered city exists today and is continually improving. Each evolved in its own place and time and is adaptable and combinable. Put them together as interconnected systems and their metropolitan regions will evolve into happier, more prosperous, regenerative cities.

In other words, if you worry that a lofty fascination with classical music is not the recipe for mediating concerns about urban density, affordability, access to public transit or climate change, fear not, because it’s all there.  I watched Rose nimbly grab excerpts like this one during our conversation, and later in the afternoon, in a response to several questions at a Seattle event sponsored by the Urban Land Institute and the Congress for the New Urbanism (as a warmup to the organizations’ overlapping Seattle conferences next Spring).  From San Francisco’s recycling example to Hong Kong’s iconic public transit system to the potential catalytic role of community groups, the book has, as he told me, a little bit for everyone interested in urban issues today.

Perhaps I am inspired by my overlaps with Rose’s world view (such as tendencies to emphasize lessons learned from cities long ago, such as the historic sustainability of Matera discussed in my 2011 The Atlantic article), but I’m just one of many who will find in The Well-Tempered City a roadmap, and many examples, of well-tempered places and their underlying principles.

For example, I would argue that today’s placemaking movement is one element of Rose’s emphasis on how we are capable of fine tuning our cities—with human scale approaches—already embedded in who we really are.

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Image of Jonathan F.P. Rose composed by the author in Seattle. © 2009-2016 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.

Chuck Wolfe’s new book on using urban observation as a tool to affect change, Seeing the Better City will be available by early 2017 from Island Press, through local booksellers and Amazon.

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why my twitter stream is singing about placemaking

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My Twitter stream is alive with the sound of placemaking.  While those are not the exact Sound of Music lyrics we remember, I am as guilty as anyone for hyping Placemaking Week in Vancouver, British Columbia (which begins September 12), using the increasingly popular twitter hashtag, #placemaking.

Three initiatives, under the umbrella of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces (PPS), will come together this week for overlapping conferences (including the PPS Placemaking Leadership Council, Future of Places and ProWalk/ProBike/Pro Place).  The common themes address how to create accessible urban places that are useful, meaningful and enjoyable to a full range of residents and visitors alike–qualities that help people decide where they really want to live.

Food trucks and human scale, sit-able places (consider the chair interventions that we now see in public spaces around the world) are just part of the focus.  Another is breaking free of the car and walkability.  Most clear is a spirit of empowerment in how the public realm develops, always contrasting with “starchitecture,” rigid design or top-down plans.  For PPS, a carefully studied, bottom-up approach is often the secret sauce of successful urban places.  This long debate about managed design versus the verbiage of democratic placemaking recently reached a zenith with a controversial essay on “bogus placemaking” by architectural critic James S. Russell last year, and the illuminating comment chain that followed.

However, like imposed urban design, conference agendas also impose a direction and control, which is ironically anathema to a bottom-up approach .  So, hearing that over 1000 people will attend (and preparing for my Future of Places presentation), I’ve been perusing the program and schedule for the week’s Placemaking Leadership Forum,  full of creative, equity-centered language and ideals, in direct preparation for the United Nations’ Habitat III Conference, which follows in Quito, Ecuador in October.

The placemaking movement is hitting stride, and its principles are embraced by a number of professional organizations—from architects, to planners, to new urbanists—under different labels but with similar livability goals.  I’m not so interested anymore about who owns the ideas, or whether a design professional is needed to implement a livable city.  While not a design professional, I am more concerned—but without Russell’s biting prose cited above—that a place-based approach remains more than pablum, and truly honors the latent needs of urban inhabitants and the findings of those well-versed in the academic discipline of place-attachment.

For some years now, I have also focused a critical eye on the role of spontaneity and authenticity in successful urban outcomes. I examined a city of celebration—with new, shared uses of closed streets and vantage points—amid the “placemaking lessons learned” as 700,000 people watched the 2014 Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl Parade.  I mused about, and wrote a book surrounding the “urbanism without effort” experienced in neighbor-generated, summer evening “alley movie nights” behind my house.

My conclusions usually stress that authentic “placemaking” with a purpose is often best, how one-time events can help crystallize potential alternative uses of urban spaces and how real neighborhood experiences offer a meaningful gloss on how to make cities better and increase shared places for all.

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Because I think success often emerges from urbanism that we already have–which is readily observable, and already there to be nurtured—I’ll be going to Vancouver with an informal metric in mind: how many of the panels, proceedings, talks and strategies avoid immediate prescription without critical analysis?  Will they remember to look first for what people have, want and need?

If nothing else, the overall program looks diverse, interactive and sensitive to the Vancouver locale.  Just outside, Vancouver will provide the perfect sort of people-centric observatory at the heart of the #placemaking song.

Images composed by the author in London and Vancouver. © 2009-2016 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.

For more on using urban observation as a tool to affect change, Seeing the Better City will be available by early 2017 from Island Press, through local booksellers and Amazon.

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urban gates, walls and political purpose

Today, The Huffington Post includes my essay on city gates and gateways of past and present, with a political twist.  Read the full narrative here.  A snapshot follows.

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observing the city: exploring dreams, not memes

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The participation of diverse voices in city decision-making processes is critical to successful urban change. By diverse, I mean not just professionals, politicians and pundits, but everyday people who live and work in city spaces. But before we can participate, we need to hone the power of personal observation.

Like the Londoners depicted in these photographs, we all have stories to tell.

Over the past eight months I have written a book about observing the urban environment, called Seeing the Better City. After much research, many interviews, and sifting through countless experiences and photographs, I concluded that better cities will emerge if city-dwellers really learn to see and understand their urban environment and how human experience intersects with the built world.

In other words, we should strive for a “vocabulary of looking” as the foundation for participation in civic discussion.

A camera and smartphone are great tools for development of this exploration and vocabulary. We can focus on common urban themes, such as street corners, plazas, parks, and other shared spaces, and evaluate what appeals to each of us, and what does not. In my book, I suggest how cities might honor constructive visual input submitted by more than just architects.  Throughout, I provide my own examples, with words and photographs called urban diaries, as sample toolboxes for how to evaluate, narrate and summarize city character and urban change over time.

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My goal is to find ways to improve civic discussion about what people see in the cities around them. Ultimately, I will be happy if city dwellers learn—with the help of many available resources—how to note carefully their emotional responses to the changes they observe, and premise understanding of urban issues on thoughtful baselines of their own, rather than only the pundit’s words.

Seeing the Better City will be available by early 2017 from Island Press, through local booksellers and Amazon.

© 2009-2016 myurbanist. All Rights Reserved. Do not copy.  For more information on the role of personal experience in understanding the changing city, see Urbanism Without Effort, an e-book from Island Press.

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‘seeing the better city’ book project begins: a teaser

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Long-time readers might enjoy the teaser post at Seeing the Better City about my new book project of the same name.  Stay tuned as the project described below unfolds in the coming months:

As ongoing urban processes visibly alter neighborhoods, downtowns and the places between, city dwellers need a practical toolkit to better see, understand and influence the evolution of their cities. In Seeing the Better City (forthcoming from Island Press), Chuck Wolfe outlines a comprehensive users’ guide to urban observation aimed at informing better, and more equitable, plans, policies and political decisions.

Seeing the Better City updates a historical, interdisciplinary tradition of urban observation, with the modern-day “urban diary”, an experiential method of documenting city life and form. Through evocative photography, use of smartphone apps, and other cutting-edge tools, Wolfe empowers readers to explore and document the urban spaces, structures and human activities around them.

For Wolfe’s earlier work, see Urbanism Without Effort (Island Press, 2013)

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