Letter to the Internet (formerly to the Editor)

Here's a hot & spicy slice of Harangue Pie I cooked up for the Boston Globe yesterday, which I decided against hurling.

Is it really a pedestrian mall?

The 2009 AIA Twenty-five Year Award recognized Faneuil Hall’s success - vibrant pedestrian streets morning, noon and night, unmentioned in the recent article about abandoning the pedestrian mall at Downtown Crossing. Downtown Crossing's sidewalks are either hectic or abandoned, and always unwelcoming. Why? My anthropology professor identified ancient active districts by the number of doors per block. Faneuil is all doors - and no curbs. Downtown Crossing has big, blank walls and deep curbs. Sidewalks are jammed; nobody steps off the curb - call it what you like, Washington Street’s still shaped like a vehicular road. Maybe its written designation is “pedestrian mall”, but the message delivered by curbs, blank walls and unwelcoming sidewalks - "keep off; keep out; keep moving"- is, unfortunately, written in stone.

Sidewalks

I loved an article in the Globe's Ideas section today, as I frequently love articles in that section of the Globe. This one was about sidewalks - more like about a woman who is about sidewalks. Actually, it was about a woman who wrote a book about sidewalks, and I anticipate loving the book as I loved the article.

Sidewalks are the arteries and organs of urbanity and a thing much neglected in the public mind. Even our own fine walk-anywhere city finds its sidewalks squeezed and mutilated to accommodate vehicular traffic, presumably to support the irrational fantasy of parking in front of your destination. University of New Orleans' Renia Ehrenfeucht takes up their cause with UCLA's Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris in what promises to be a bright-eyed, broad-minded book, "Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space", out in May.

I just found this image from Bruce Mau's book - powerlines collapsed under the weight of snow - completely beautiful and exciting, from a blog I stumbled across (called predesign)

and really wanted to share.

the re-surfacing of Teddy Cruz

A friend sent me this article on Artkrush, an interview with Teddy Cruz. I wrote about him last year when he was in town and still find his work fascinating; he experiments with and highlights the difference between the uber-planned, government/developer spaces (formal) and the socially determined (informal), and although he doesn't go for the jugular, hints at the corrosion of our democracy reflected in these regulated spaces and the inability of citizens to responsibly make these decisions in modern planning. The current paradigm strikes me as disturbingly contrary to the core values of democracy, and suggests that the inhabitants of the informal might be better in touch with true democracy than those of the formal. I also really enjoy his description of possible 'pixelization' of these mcmansions, possibly the first of many 'pixelizations' and a movement toward a high-resolution built world: designed not for magazines and elevations, but for experiencing up-close. I recommend you read it.

The Olmsteds and American urbanity, present and future

I never realized how much of America the Olmsteds shaped. I knew about the parks, of course. but then there were the parkways, campuses, and enormous subdivisions they planned, setting the tone for practically a century of urban and landscape planning.

The Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and Arnold Arboretum hosted a panel discussion this past Sunday. Historian Charles Beveridge, UVA's Ethan Carr and Yale's Alexander Garvin and Dolores Hayden (who has authored some very interesting books) spoke specifically on the future of the Olmsted legacy, past and future. The family (Olmsted's sons have careers as prodigious as his own) defined the American city and suburb, with a little help from the City Beautiful movement, etc. - injecting a thirst for "natural" (though heavily engineered) green spaces into the public mind, a noble cause in the filthy cities of their time. In retrospect, they had a hand in our contemporary problem of sprawl.

I can't help but suspect there are solutions to sprawl in Olmsted ideas. His insistance that nature should be part of daily experience and that parks should be inclusive of all activity made me think of my daily commute. It also conflicts with the strict definition of American public space as leasure space, where the business of life is excluded. All public spaces in America, save a very few, are either strict leasure olmstead parks, or elaborate ornament for shopping or civic use. Rarely is there the richness of piazza life, were citizens interact in real-time.

The day left me dreaming of my urban streets filled not with sooty smog but the Olmstedian picturesque, my front door contuguous with all-purpose, useful parks. The convergence of these ideas - Olmsted, Shared Space, super-scale "machines as garens", is a hopeful sign, let's hope I get to be a part of it. ;)

'Machine as the Garden' & the future of development

The Spring/Summer Harvard Design Magazine's main theme is non-formal cities, a hot topic and certainly a rich one - but the there is an an exciting counterpoint to this issue. Nathalie Beauvais, examines an exceptionally 'formal' planned city (well, campus extension): Harvard's Allston Campus. And her article is, mercifully, free. 

She asserts elegantly that the environmental "performance targets... can be read like source code... [and] will direct the forms of the built environment", facades will perform as permeable, reactive skins, and an entire ecosystem of solar panels, geothermal wells, bioswales and their compatriots will increase efficiency and protect the Charles river. The article explains much better than I can (links will remain valid until the issue is archived, I'm guessing).

Frequently the sheer scale of contemporary development seems overwhelming, homogeneous, a dehumanizing beast to attach stone veneer to or rally against at town meeting. What is so exciting about this article and the idea of the working landscape is that entire neighborhoods are being thought of as systems and structures; that scale is being used to enable harmonious diversity and increase sustainability rather than threaten these things.

Shared Spaces: harnessing the civility of people

A recent article in the Boston Globe Magazine suggests "Boston drivers are bad, but Boston pedestrians might be worse", presumably because they break traffic rules. But what if the rules are the problem? Because of the questionable habits of both parties, many streets in Boston exist in a de facto state of Shared Space, the slowly & steadily growing idea of Dutch planner Hans Monderman. It seems we are edging toward the recognition that the urban street is an altogether unique creature.

The idea is that all our fussing and stoplights and walklights and orchestration for safety is making our streets less safe. Drivers and pedestrians believe if they obey, everything will be fine. People stop thinking. Shared Space advocates the removal of curbs, signs, lights, etc. and letting people figure it out for themselves. Calling on common sense and cooperation, it harnesses the civility of people rather than letting it atrophy. Apparently it actually does reduce accidents, and reportedly reduces congestion due to increased efficiency.

The aesthetic value of clearing the clutter is promising as well, in addition to the promise of freeing urban life from the four foot strip of concrete mashed against building facades.

It's had success in the Dutch town of Drachten and in Germany.

The discussion brings the larger political implications of urban design tantalizingly close to the surface, but that's a post for another day.

"We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour, ...The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles." ^[4]
- Hans Monderman