January 2009 Archives

Pecha Kucha (pecha-kcha) is Japanese for the sound of conversation. It is also a presentation format, 20x20, of 20 slides timed for 20 seconds each, or a 6 minute 40 second presentation. The following are the slides from a speed format version, 10 seconds each for 3 minutes 20 seconds. I talked over the transitions so the text doesn't follow exactly.

When I think of travel, I think of crossing the water and of walking in cities. So here is the Millennium pedestrian bridge in London. When they added this bridge, they found that it had a multiplier effect.



It increased the pedestrian traffic on both sides of the river, in both directions, and on the adjacent bridges. The reason for this is because of what it connects - it forms a very strong axis between the major landmark of St. Pauls and the Tate Modern museum across the Thames.



The Tate Modern, the old Bankside power station by Giles Gilbert Scott redesigned as an art museum by Herzog and de Meuron.



The old turbine hall is a tremendous gallery space, which the Marsyas installation made magical use of. There was still an active transformer which made the most eerie sound, and it was an incredible experience overall.



Here is another abandoned power station by Scott, at Battersea. This one doesn't have the advantage of those great connections, and it is in trouble.



The Hungerford pedestrian bridge, connecting Waterloo station to Charing Cross terminus, was a tremendous recent undertaking. The original Hungerford bridge was designed by Brunel, who also designed and built the railway and bridge that replaced it.


He reused the suspension chains in this Clifton bridge across the Avon River Gorge. Brunel was an overachieving genius, smoked 40 cigars a day, and died of a stroke at 53.



A private group was trying to raise funds to hang a pedestrian bridge off of the Cannon Street rail bridge, but they were not successful. Here is what it would have connected to:



Borough Market is a truly wonderful gourmet and specialty food market, nestled under the rail viaducts that connect through London Bridge Station. Those viaducts will be reconfigured with a planned rail expansion.



This photo was taken before the market was remodeled; it's all clean and shiny now.They reused the facade from the old Covent Garden flower hall. Some of these roofs may have to come down for the rail expansion.



These connections to the historically neglected south side of the river are spurring redevelopment. This old warehouse is now the upscale Vinopolis wine bar and cellars.



Slightly further south you can still see the evidence of neglect. Cities need these cycles of abandonment and redevelopment, though.



To the north is this place at the top of the cycle, Neals Yard near Covent Garden. It's almost too prettified but has wonderful spatial qualities.



Back across the river, this is the linchpin of a huge development project on the south bank; London City Hall and the More London development by Norman Foster.

This is the "bathtub", sort of an excavated shadow of the building. It is a place for urban theater and is very well enjoyed on a sunny day.

This is a very odd looking building, but supposedly a very energy efficient form. They added solar to the roof in 2008. On a good day there is a tremendous amount of pedestrian activity along the river. This was actually a citywide Open House day, and the opening day for City Hall.

Inside City Hall on opening day. The interior spiraling ramped stair is absolutely insane, hard to comprehend. Every stair tread is a custom shape.

The spatial intent echoes that of the dome of the Reichstag in Berlin, also by Foster, aiming to bring light and openness to governmental affairs. You can look down and see the Council chambers at the bottom, or could if this was open during sessions.

This large window wall faces north, lets in light, and has great views of the City. The Tower of London is visible in one of the top panes.

The end. When you travel, don't forget to look in your own backyard. Seattle, for example, is of interest to people all over the world.

 

 I stopped at Ciao's [my spelling; it's more likely Chou, but it's all about the pronunciation, anyway] restaurant, Bayou on 1st, shortly before closing time one night. She had the door blocked with chairs so I called in to make sure she was open. She was just mopping, so I came in to eat. She kept watching the door, nervous. A young man looked in the window, then came in, grabbed a menu, set it at the bar and continued on to the restroom, which Ciao usually keeps locked, but had the mop bucket in the doorway at this time. She rushed back, shut the door and told him it was closed for cleaning. He made a fuss and then left. She explained to me that he is one of the habitual addicts who frequent the neighborhood, supporting the local plague of drug dealers. He's been in before, and at neighboring shops, leaving without paying or grabbing something and running. He is befuddled enough to forget that she knows who he is. She was still nervous and called her husband Haji, who came in to stay until closing time.

 

Small business owners like Ciao are a very important part of a true urban neighborhood, meaning compact and dense enough to support neighborhood retail uses. Those people who come from a culture of neighborhood shopkeepers, such as we have in our market, are key figures in building and maintaining a sense of community. The neighborhood shopkeeper is something almost lost in our own culture so our shopkeepers are often from elsewhere. There are exceptions, though. Jack Levy at Three Girls Bakery, who figures significantly in the functioning of the neighborhood, is one of those who grew up in the tradition of the market, working at a family stand, then coming back later to buy his own business. The continuous functioning of the market for over one-hundred years has kept many traditions of local culture alive.

 

I am often unable to go visit family at the traditional holiday times. Ciao cooks the food that I grew up eating at family meals, and I frequently go there. She is Vietnamese, Haji is from the Middle East, and they serve the best Cajun food as required by market historical rules. I went there for a Thanksgiving day gumbo. Ciao's niece Vi was working, and Vi's husband and small daughter Katy came in to visit. Some of Ciao's other regular customers were there and we all had a great visit with her family, with children dancing around the floor. Ciao usually offers me some unusual fruit I haven't had before. Recently she gave me a fresh pickle of carrot, daikon and lotus root, which she said is a tradition for the lunar New Year. I was very pleased, as I had missed my own traditional New Year meal of blackeyed peas and cabbage and the pickle was delicious. I felt that my luck for the year was restored. From very different backgrounds we manage to produce a lot of commonality. The Latin for "together" is the root for commerce and for community.

Warning: Don't watch if you are susceptible to motion sickness.

 

The emblem of Dallas, Pegasus rising, is borrowed from the logo of the former Mobil Oil Corporation. Big oil and JR Ewing oil tycoons are stereotypical Dallas icons. The city once had an impressive downtown core, with a ring of convenient streetcar suburbs. A celebration of the freedom and independence of private vehicles gave birth to a ring of highways that throttled the downtown, cut off the inner suburbs, and generated an almost incomprehensible scale of sprawling development across the vast spaces of the North Texas prairies. Downtown was very densely compact, never very large in area. This was possible because the buildings had very little associated parking, as people rode streetcars into town. As automobiles replaced streetcars, parking lots ate away the civic body like a cancer. It still looks like a war zone in places, with solitary buildings standing in a vacant wasteland.



Although the damage is vast and possibly beyond repair, Dallas is changing. They have in place a successful light rail system, Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) which feeds from suburban cities through the downtown core. It is successful enough that it has captured a major share of federal transit funds for expansion.

 

This transit revolution includes revival of the streetcar suburbs. When McKinney Avenue was being resurfaced in the 1980s, the original streetcar tracks down the center were uncovered. A hobbyist and enthusiast started the McKinney Avenue Transit Authority, which in 1989 brought back a trolley system with vintage cars to this original alignment. The historic State Thomas streetcar suburb, which had been decimated through decay and neglect after being cut off from the downtown by highways, experienced a renaissance of compact transit oriented development. I lived in this neighborhood for a time, worked for the company that had planned it, and lived in a building designed by the architects I worked with. Talk about immersion. I would ride the trolley to work downtown, or often walk, which meant crossing the Woodall Rogers Freeway. A plan for a highway lid park to reconnect the Downtown to the State Thomas neighborhood, now part of a larger area of intense, and intensely popular redevelopment called Uptown, has been under discussion. Will the city learn to walk again? Already people fill the suburban DART park and ride lots to capacity, and walk across a quarter mile of parking to get to the station. The next step is to condense walkable development in that quarter mile.

  

Seattle doesn't know how to operate in snow. We had an unusual snow situation in December, with heavy snow falling for several days in one week, causing a rare buildup that stuck around and effectively shut down much of the day-to-day business of the city.



It also created an unusual opportunity for a sense of community, at least in my downtown neighborhood. Without all of the traffic, our streets were quiet. People who had nothing better to do felt free to get out and walk the streets, wave to and chat with their neighbors. People were sledding in the streets, or getting their exercise by shoveling sidewalks. It was a quite different feel from a normal business day, when every other street is a major traffic arterial filled with hurtling tons of loud, smelly vehicles. What if everyone lived near work, or near convenient transit? My neighborhood could be more like this every day.

 

I tried to make a list of all the cities I've walked in. I still haven't finished, it just keeps growing. I don't feel I've traveled that much. Is it just because I've lived so long? I'm not that old, either. I was moved about as a child, and have never really grown roots. I don't think I truly understand belonging to a community, or committing myself to one place, or to anything, really, except for family - and inconsistently even there. I did live for 21 years in Austin, Texas, until my son was grown to independence. I moved away at the drop of a hat, not even saying goodbye to the love of my life, who was overseas at the time. I haven't spoken to him since.



I think Samuel Johnson said, to paraphrase, that "When one is tired of London, one is tired of life". London is my favorite city in the world, but I have spent enough time there, and walked the streets so often, that I could imagine a time when I would grow tired of London. I wouldn't mind having the opportunity to test that hypothesis, though.



I've tried establishing myself in one city, putting down roots. I join organizations, I volunteer. Then I leave. I fell in love with Seattle and vowed to make it my home. I knew I would have trouble gaining acceptance, and that my accent would forever mark me as an outsider. I wanted to earn my citizenship in this city that I love, so I practiced a form of immersion. I volunteer for habitat restoration. I serve on a citizens advisory committee for the public utility. I paint facilities for the homeless. I offer pro-bono professional services to non-profits, and serve on committees for my professional organization. I attend my Community Council meetings, and many other meetings of local organizations. I threw myself in. And I still, quite often, have the urge to chuck it all and become a wanderer, as I have done before, living only with what I can carry on my back. There are still so many cities to walk in.

I wrote previously that native Seattleites are cautious. This article puts it on stronger terms: the "Seattle Freeze". It describes Seattleites as cold, distant, and not trusting. I had an interesting conversation recently with a man from Rome who I encountered on the sidewalk. He complained that people he meets here haven't been friendly. We remarked on our different accents, and on the fact that the natives don't have any accent. I used the explanation for unfriendliness as a caution in a place where the majority of people are strangers. I doubt that I really understand, though, not being a native.

I am a very reserved person, but am open to speaking to strangers that I meet. Its good practice for an urbanist and researcher, and for life in general (keeping caution in mind, of course), as it is possible to learn so much from our fellow travelers. Early one morning in Dublin, Ireland, I was unsuccessfully searching for a laundromat when I encountered a roguish pair sitting on the steps of a building at Trinity College, eating takeout for breakfast. They hailed me, and I came over and sat with them for a while, which they were slightly surprised by. One asked me if I made a habit of speaking to strangers and I replied that yes, as a matter of fact I do.


 
Another time I was doing research in Hampstead, outside of London, and found myself locked out of a community I wished to explore. I stood by the gate looking lost, and a resident not only let me in and gave me a tour, he then drove me around all of Hampstead as my guide, pointing out everything of interest.

I've done extensive backpack travel, and have sometimes been taken for a rough wanderer. I went to Skagen, Denmark, once, not realizing that it is a favorite vacation spot for the Danes and that accommodations would be hard to come by. I asked a man in the yard of a house if he had any vacant guest rooms. He at first had the impression that I was offering service in trade; an easily corrected misunderstanding. He was then a very informative host, telling me all the must-sees in Skagen. The next morning he gave me breakfast and we had a long talk about art, architecture, cities and travel. I regretted only staying one day but Skagen was expensive.



Another time I got caught in Norway by the seasonal change of the ferry schedule coming back to Bodo from the Lofoten Islands. I got in too late for the hostel and spent the rest of the night freezing outside the door. A man was walking back and forth trying to keep warm. At first I startled and looked up every time he came by; then got used to him and judged him harmless. We were both waiting for the train station to open. He spoke no English and I don't speak Norske but he showed me how to order breakfast, and then helped me fit my pack in a smaller, less expensive locker then the one I had chosen, as the train didn't leave for some hours. Just another fellow traveler, a stranger.

It is somewhat mind-boggling to consider how small the world has become, how our sense of geography has changed. In 1998 I took what was, for me, a life-changing course on how to think about cities. The professor, Shane Davies, had a lecture called "The Death of Distance", based on a book of the same title. The topic of the book was how instantaneous web-based communications contribute to connections across the globe. While there are many examples of how we are increasingly tied together on this small island of a planet, climate change being the big frightening one, there are also some delightful social implications.

Gianluca (Photocoyote on Flickr), from Cesena, Italy is very passionate about Seattle, particularly as regards the music scene. He came here on honeymoon with his wife Lisa, and upon his return to Italy he started several Flickr groups just for Seattle photos. One group is just for people who live in Seattle. He organizes photowalks recreating walks he did while he was here. He posts a Google map and photos of things to look for. It's really very funny to think that someone in Italy is acting as tour guide for people in Seattle, but it is also very effective. I go places and see things in my own city that I probably wouldn't have sought out otherwise. Seeing your city from far-flung viewpoints can be very enlightening.



I went on a walk today, but was late and missed the group. Flaneurism strikes me as being an individual and undirected practice, but sometimes it helps to go along with other people, because everyone is looking at something different, and sees things in a different way. That's one more good thing about strangers, too.

I once did a study using isovist and space syntax measures in relation to social behavior in urban spaces. In that study I had better results with isovist measures than with space syntax measures. Now I am finding applications in which space syntax is more useful. Bill Hillier, the "father" of space syntax analysis, suggested as much: That axial lines should be used for intelligibility, global properties and movement; isovists for static local uses of space. Isovist grids, or visibility graphs, provide output that looks similar to that of axial line maps, but they really are measuring different things. Axial lines predict movement, or movement choices, which require some conscious thought. Isovists measure and predict behaviours which are more dependent upon environmental qualities, or perception and awareness.

 

Passenger flow and integration map at Victoria Station: Space Syntax Office

Space syntax, or axial line analysis, is useful for accessibility mapping. If you want to increase pedestrian traffic to a destination, such as a transit station in the midst of transit oriented development, you want to increase the pedestrian accessibility. So far I am finding two syntax measures, Connectivity and Integration, the most useful for this purpose.

Space syntax started as very wonkish academic theory out of the University College London, but has been put into practice through the work of the Space Syntax Office. One very striking project using this analysis was the Trafalgar Square redo with Norman Foster. They did a fine-grained mapping of pedestrian routes, based on actual observation (it helps to have a lot of university students to do this). They mapped different options to improve accessibility - the best one had a central staircase from a newly pedestrianized street between the square and the National Gallery.

 
Existing and proposed access routes for Trafalgar Square: Space Syntax Office

Some "after shots - the stair worked even better than hoped, as seating for urban theater. The Google aerial was obviously shot during a special event - perhaps a car-free day? It's a major crowd, following the paths predicted, very impressive.