Europe’s Mean Streets

By on May 20, 2012

One of the delights of being in Bologna recently was meeting, courtesy of my colleague Gabriele Manella, other scholars doing urban research in the University of Bologna’s Sociology Department.  I’m honored for our anthropology department here at DU to be an Associated Partner for grant proposals that have been submitted by these UNIBO colleagues to their country’s Ministry of Education for research on urban sprawl and sustainable growth.  While in Bologna I learned about some other work that UNIBO sociologists are doing on the uses of public space.  One project is a detailed study of Bologna’s Piazza Giuseppe Verdi, a public square that symbolizes the relationship between the city and its university and that’s famous for the diversity of its local user population (e.g., see here). Another is a study of the material strategies—in the form of new urban furniture—being used by civic officials to exclude the homeless from the use of public space.

Piazza Giuseppe Verdi (courtesy Gabriele Manella)

It’s the latter theme that focuses this post.  I first encountered these homeless exclusion strategies—the “bum-proof” bench, the fortified dumpster, the gated civic building—in Mike Davis’ classic study of Los Angeles.  They are now the stuff of frequent commentary in the blogosphere (e.g., here and here).  A 2005 report by the European Observatory on Homelessness details some of the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that architecture and street furniture—and their far-from-innocent decorative elements—are being used to control the lifeways of people who are homeless in Europe.  According to this report “anti-homeless” benches, gates and fences have been spreading all over the continent.

Parisian Banc Publics (From G. Paté, Sociologique sur l’ordinaire des Espaces Urbains, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 159, 116-120, 2005)

UNIBO colleagues Marco Castrignano and Maurizio Bergamaschi presented a very interesting and richly illustrated paper about the Italian context called “The Street Furniture Law: How Homeless Can Be Excluded from Public Space” at the 2010 meeting of the International Visual Sociology Association held in Bologna. Castrignano and Bergamaschi note that in the last several years 800 local ordinances on the safety and management of public space have been implemented in some 400 Italian municipalities. These ordinances are designed to combat the “illegal occupation of public space” and maintain the “decorum” of the city.  The use of particular kinds of street furniture figures prominently as way to enforce this urban decorum.  In some instances (Treviso, Trieste, Padua) public benches have been completely removed from city streets.  In others (Verona, Bologna, Savona) they’ve been replaced by forms having intentionally anti-homeless designs; e.g., barrel-shaped benches or conventional ones with bars that prevent lying down.  The new furniture has been placed in parks, squares, and streets with heavy pedestrian traffic.

Some anti-loitering interventions recently observed in Bologna are akin to the anti-roosting spikes used to keep pigeons from perching on window ledges:

And then there are tactics such as these that likewise keep people off of ledges and out of doorways:

Castrignano and Bergamaschi note that anti-homeless street furniture very often goes unnoticed by the average Italian citizen.  The foreign traveler is even more likely to miss it given the many seductive and distracting charms of “Old Urbanism.” The material tactics of habitat that socially-divide and exclude are a revelation for my American students once they know to look for them.  Economic downturns and insurgent movements for social change are likely to produce increasingly sadistic street environments in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere until we figure out ways to better mesh the need for urban decorum with the right to the city. 

This entry is filed under General, Urban Studies.

Update: “Greatest Work of Architecture Built in This Century” Completed

By on May 18, 2012

We’re still skeptical, but Archinect has the report and some pretty good pictures and drawings here.

"Big Pants", Beijing (Iwan Baan)

This entry is filed under Architecture.

Bologna Debriefed: Reflecting on “Contours of The City”

By on May 9, 2012

I’m just back from the “Contours of The City Conference” in Bologna, organized by the University of Bologna’s Laboratorio di Ricerca Sulle Città.  It was all good: terrific hosts, stimulating company, an elegant meeting venue, and great cuisine.

The conference honored Giovanna Franci, one of the co-founders of the Laboratorio and the  European side co-director of our Atlantis project until her death in 2009.  An original and interdisciplinary thinker, Giovanna received some fitting tributes from colleagues, including Umberto Eco who praised her for serving as an “ambassador of Italian culture in barbarian countries.”

The conference was small and intimate.  The sessions were sequential so attendees could hear every presentation.  There were sessions on urban destruction and regeneration, urban “mapping” (in both its physical and ideological senses), urban sustainability (including problems around fear and security), and representations of the urban (specifically, Venice, Paris, London, and some other cities).  A variety of disciplinary and  interdisciplinary perspectives were on offer.  Most presentations were in English and the remaining few in Italian.  I was a participant in the session on destruction and regeneration, and I’ve posted my talk on “Urban Imaginaries and American Infill” to the Presentations page of this website.  It’s also available here.  All presentations will be published in book form by the Laboratorio later this year or early next.  This will be the third book to emerge from Laboratorio events.  The first is a very handsome volume on Looking at The City in Transformation.  The second will deal with Brasilia.  The Laboratorio’s list of past and future events and conferences is impressive (full disclosure: I’m a member of the Laboratorio’s Enlarged Scientific Committee).

Conference Meeting Room: Capella Farnese, Palazzo d'Accursio (D. Saitta)

A few presentations directly related to themes explored on this blog and also spoke to each other in interesting ways.  I’ll mention just a couple to give a sense of range. Dushko Bogunovich (Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand) spoke on “The City and The Crunch: Contours of a Pending Disaster.”  Like many other urbanists, Dushko predicts an impending “perfect storm” for cities wrought by climate change, population growth, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss.  To weather the storm we must change our collective institutions (what Dushko terms “groupware”), individual behavior (“software”), and technology (“hardware”).  One of Dushko’s points is that low density urbanism is not necessarily a barrier to a sustainable future if it is resilient.  This contrasts with some significant current thinking about American urban sustainability.  Dushko also stressed that what we do in our educational institutions will be key to addressing the emerging crisis; specifically, we need to rethink dominant paradigms in town planning, urban design, and civil engineering.

Guido Moretti (a Bologna-based urban planner and engineer) picked up on some of these points.  He struck a more hopeful note in a very interesting speech (translated for me on-the-fly by Elena Lamberti, for which I’m extremely grateful!) on “Protecting Cities.”  The speech examined cities in the Islamic tradition.  Signore Moretti detailed some characteristics of the often secluded “medina” that spring up, and thrive, in surroundings that present severe challenges of extreme heat and scarce water.   The medina embody knowledge, accumulated over thousands of years, about how to plan and build in such environments so as to guarantee not only survival but also an intense, productive, and secure social life.   Streets are lively, welcoming areas of socialization and commerce.  Towers, domes, patios, underground canals, fountains, reflecting surfaces, and other elements of infrastructure harvest water from desert winds and sands and thermo-regulate the city.  In Signore Moretti’s words, the Islamic medina “represents a useful and topical reference point with respect to our wastefully expensive and negligent modernity.”   They provide lessons in appropriate and sustainable urbanism.  I’d argue that such reference points and lessons, along with the paradigmatic rethinking mentioned by Dushko, should be a vital part of any progressive curriculum in contemporary urban planning and design.

Paris Street in Rainy Weather (Gustave Caillebotte)

Finally, several scholars gave presentations dealing with the flâneur –the writer, poet, intellectual, and assorted others who observe city life by walking among the crowd.  Although I assign a bit of John Gay when I teach study abroad in London, prior to this conference I hadn’t thought much about what the literature on flânerie could contribute to understanding and regenerating the city.   I certainly learned from the presenters that there’s significant debate about how to define and deploy the concept of flâneur in studies of the city.  Those debates notwithstanding, I was struck by the suggestion of Giampaolo Nuvolati, an urban sociologist at the University of Milan, that we might produce better urban planners—and thus better contexts and settings for conducting urban social life—if we require our students to research, and experience the city as, flâneurs.

Included in the conference agenda  were tours of the art  collections of the Pallazo d’Accursio and the Pinacoteca, and  two intermezzos consisting of readings on “Imaginary Cities.” The conference ended with a screening of the cult film Koyaanisqatsi, which I’m embarrassed to admit I saw for the very first time given that in an earlier life I researched and wrote about the Ancestral Pueblo Indians, including ancestors of the Hopi and Zuni.  The film certainly provided an appropriate end–and a compelling challenge–to a conference of urbanists dedicated to analyzing the quality, pace, and sustainability of urban life.  Another positive outcome of the conference was meeting, through my friend and colleague Gabriele Manelli (a Research Fellow in the University of Bologna’s Department of Sociology) some other scholars doing interesting research on urban poverty, homelessness and the built environment.  More on that to come…

Palazzo d' Accursio and Piazza Maggiore (D. Saitta)

This entry is filed under General, Sustainability, Urban Studies.

Watering the Cosmopolis

By on April 18, 2012

I use the concept of cosmopolis in Leonie Sandercock’s sense, referring to a city that’s developed in ways sensitive to cultural diversity and its wider societal benefits (e.g., enhanced vitality and creativity). In a recent post I noted that the sessions devoted to “Wilderness City” water planning at the Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute’s 2012 Conference seemed to take as self-evident the meaning of terms like “public”, “values”, “housing” and, especially, “culture.” Proposed solutions to urban “hydro-sustainability” problems were informed by a Western worldview that sees water as a scarce economic good or commodity.  Many of the discussions were framed in terms of white, middle-class consumer values and behavior, and the settlement preferences of Generation X and Generation Y.  (Some of the RMLUI conference talks and slide shows are posted here).    In short, it  wasn’t clear that conference presenters were thinking about the city as a cosmopolitan enterprise.

Resources can be valued on something other than economic, utilitarian grounds, and urban demography can be described in terms other than Gen X and Gen Y.  It’s an anthropological taken-for-granted that cultures value and assign meaning to water differently.  For many cultures water is a spiritual as well as an economic good.  For some it’s a basic human right.  Minimally, water is integral to many if not most domains of society.  The different meanings and structural relationships of water need to be recognized by urban planners and basic service providers.  Daily household demands for water are also cross-culturally variable.  Thus, it’s problematic to assume that any particular pattern of water consumption is “typical”  for an urban population generally.  Water management issues are as much cultural—or intercultural—as technical.   While particular Non-Western notions of water as sacred can easily dovetail with a Western ethos of environmental sustainability, particular regulating strategies like water metering, recycling, budgeting, etc. can conflict  with particular cultural values identifying water as sacred and a basic human right.  Certainly, management strategies like differential pricing based on intensity of use can easily discriminate against some cultural groups and contradict broader civic commitments to  tolerance and inclusion.

Ritual Bathing in the Ganges River, India

Interest in the cultural values that shape water use has been growing since at least 2000.  In that year UNESCO organized a session on “Water and Indigenous People” at the 2nd World Water Forum at The Hague.  The organizing theme for the 3rd World Water Forum in Kyoto in 2003 was “Water and Cultural Diversity.”   Even with these significant interventions the Cultural Diversity and Water Sustainability “Session Situation Document” for the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul in 2009 noted that “interdisciplinary and systemic analysis of the relationships between cultural diversity and water, and their implications for sustainable management of water resources, are still lacking.”

Still, there’s been some notable work establishing the difference that culture makes in affecting water use.  A collection of case studies from the Environmental Evaluation Unit at the University of Cape Town–A Desktop Study on the Cultural and Religious Uses of Water– describes various rituals and ceremonies in traditional African religions as well as religions like Islam and Hinduism in which water plays a central role.  Some of these rituals require facilities for water pooling. In other ceremonies water has to be running.  In still others the water must be pure and neither tap nor recycled waste or “grey” water will suffice.  Some of these rituals clearly have implications for urban design and architecture.  Interestingly, the report’s authors note that these rituals and ceremonies have been gaining popularity in urban as well as rural areas. Thus, the widely noted world-wide migration of people from country to city is not likely to change cultural practices involving the use of water.

Faucets for performing ritual ablutions, Istanbul

London–the quintessential cosmopolis–looks to be ahead of the curve in researching cultural diversity and water use in ways that can inform management decisions.   A 2006 paper reporting studies of water flows in District Metered Areas (DMAs) in number of British cities noted “startling differences” in water use patterns that are related to religious and cultural practices.  Characteristic patterns are found principally in Jewish and Muslim communities.  For example, there’s a Jewish peak on Friday afternoon in anticipation of Shabbat.  Within Muslim communities intense washing precedes daily prayers, especially during the month of Ramadan.  Prescriptions in Islam against wasting water align with Western conservation values but there are clearly times when unusual amounts of water must be available for various practices.  The importance of using running water in a cultural practice of “washing up” is also a characteristic of Hindu groups. In this case, however, the practice links not to religious belief but rather to culturally-inscribed dietary practices: the high fat and oil content of Indian cooking.  In short:

The overwhelming evidence is that religion [and culture generally] has a fundamental bearing not only on how people use water but also on how they think about water. The overall conclusion is that it would be extremely unwise to exclude religion or ethnicity as parameters in any further research into understanding domestic water demand…Understanding such fundamental differences caused by religious practice may be critical to the planning and design of network water systems.

Hindu ritual involving water in Alagarkoil, near Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India

A 2007 report– Cultural Diversity and Sustainable Water Management in Greater London: The Research Agenda–  summarizes and extends work like that described above.   It’s very aggressive in critiquing the implicit assumption of a “white, Christian norm” of water consumption that far too often (and perhaps unconsciously) informs water management strategies.  It’s likely that such a norm also pervades other assumptions about, say, cultural standards of cleanliness.  While there are some  clear convergences between “West” and “Other” in the ways that water is valued, the report concludes that there’s “little to suggest that valuations of water in any faith systematically translate to a tendency to water conservation.” Effective and sustainable  demand management strategies require beginning with diversity in cultural identities and values, and especially with diversity in the everyday practices, habits, and routines of the consuming population.

Water management for urban sustainability in Cosmopolis–like management of the built environment generally–must accommodate cultural diversity. If it doesn’t it risks ensuring that urban and exurban infill developments remain enclaves for middle class whites; i.e., homogenous communities that are conceivably “gated by other means.”

This entry is filed under General, Sustainability, Urban Studies, Water and The City.

Art, Public Space, and a “Just Aesthetic”

By on April 11, 2012

Alaka Wali

My title, and especially the concept of a “Just Aesthetic”, is attributable to Alaka Wali,  Curator of North American Anthropology and Director of Applied Cultural Research in the Environment, Culture and Conservation Division at Chicago’s Field Museum.  Yesterday Dr. Wali spoke at the University of Denver on the topic of  “Civic Aesthetic and Difference: The Circulation of Art in Chicago’s Public Spaces.”  Dr. Wali described an existing tension between the sponsors of formal, “urban chic” art (such as found in The Loop) and those beyond the Loop who produce gritty, grass roots, “chaotically-local” art.  The former is intended to “brand” Chicago as a global city. The latter is used by resident, mostly minority group citizens to mark space and assert their ethnic identity.   Some forms of this local, chaotic art is tolerated by city officials, while other forms are not.  What’s at stake, at the end of the day, is the city’s commitment to a ‘just aesthetic’ that gives people the freedom to make urban place as they see fit; i.e., their aesthetic right to the city.

"Globally Branded" Art: Cloud Gate

The forces producing this aesthetic tension in Chicago are many, but among them is gentrification. This process has dispersed ethnic peoples across the city and suburbs creating, in Dr. Wali’s words, a “patchwork of wealth and poverty.”  Rather than lessening the salience of ethnicity in everyday life (as some might expect if people are being randomly dispersed across the city), this process has only increased it.  The result is the intensified deployment by minority groups of several strategies aimed at asserting their space in the metropolis. Dr. Wali described these strategies as:

1. Aesthetic marking of difference: The use of visual culture, like murals, to mark space, e.g., those deployed by the Puerto Rican community in Humboldt Park.

2. Art-making in public spaces: The use of  of public spaces like parking lots, parks, vacant lots, public libraries, and church basements as venues for activities like drumming circles, dance groups, community theatre, quilting clubs, etc.

3. Claiming space for informal economies: e.g., street performers, food trucks and carts, and vendors of other goods.

4. Performances of Resilience: activities that assert local cultural identity and pride, and public protests of the conditions that affect a neighborhood’s quality of life (crime, gentrification).

Humboldt Park Mural: "Unidos Para Triunfar" (Together We Overcome)

All of these strategies count among the tactics (perhaps most famously described as “weapons of the weak“) that disenfranchised, marginalized, and subaltern peoples have long used to assert power and resist majority-group domination.  What’s compelling is Dr. Wali’s distinctive way of framing them.  Dr. Wali has noticed an  intensification of their use in the 15 years that she’s been living in Chicago.  Some activities (like #2) enjoy very high rates of participation that cross-cut categories of age, occupation, and gender.  Interethnic (or, intercultural) cross-cutting is still elusive, however. As noted above, some of this informal art-making is tolerated by civic authorities while other forms are thwarted by official interventions such as the levying of licensing fees to sell street food and other goods, and the denial of parade permits.  Certainly, there is little to no official effort to support local art-making in ways that would reinforce the distinctly urban cultural character of individual neighborhoods.  My question to Dr. Wali in the Q&A session about whether there was any relationship between local artists and Occupy Chicago activists was treated as a good one that couldn’t be answered—perhaps indicating yet another missed opportunity for that movement to join with others to realize its insurgent goals.

At best, the local art-makers have attracted the attention of civic authorities.  The new 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan (scheduled for fall release) aims to “identify opportunities for arts and cultural growth for the city.”`  Input about ways to secure the cultural future of the city will be solicited from residents and stakeholders in Town Halls held in each of the city’s 50 wards.   New art districts for mixed income areas is imagined.  More opportunities may emerge if certain other enabling conditions can be put in place, such as greater diversity on the boards of the city’s cultural institutions. Until then a “just aesthetic” is likely to remain more a hope than a reality, in Chicago and elsewhere.

 

This entry is filed under General, Urban Studies.

Bologna Bound: “Contours of The City” Conference

By on April 9, 2012

In three weeks time I’ll be headed to Bologna, Italy to participate in an international conference on the City sponsored by the University of Bologna’s Laboratorio di Ricerca sulle Città (Laboratory for Research on the City).  The laboratory was co-founded in 2008 by Professor Giovanna Franci of the university’s Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and Professor Raffaele Milani of the Department of Philosophy.  The Laboratory has, as its central goal, to analyze the transformations of the contemporary city from an interdisciplinary perspective. The mission is to help improve the quality of urban life and the prospects for long term urban sustainability.  Specific objectives include critical description and analysis of urban design and architectural form, the history and evolution of cities, immigrant and refugee integration, the representation of cities in popular culture and media, and the forms of citizenship that accompany (and are produced by) various urban materialities. The activities of the Laboratory encompass  conventions, seminars, exhibitions and other events for scholarly and popular audiences.

Bologna's Urban Heart and Soul: Piazza Maggiore (D. Saitta)

The upcoming Contours of the City Conference is one such event.  It will serve not only to further the Lab’s interdisciplinary and international mission but also memorialize the life of Giovanna Franci, who passed away in the fall of 2009.  Here’s a description of the conference that illustrates the kind of integrative thinking about the city that Giovanna exemplified in her life and that the Laboratory now seeks to promote following her death:

Giovanna Franci

“Observing the landscape and city has inspired many writers and painters to immerse themselves in a vision that amalgamates the world of reality with that of dreams. The forms of places, whether at daybreak or dusk, the alternation of day and night as well as the cycle of the seasons, have promoted a visionary sense of time and place. Here we find the splendour of the eternal flux of all things, a thought expressed across the languages. People perceive the world as a common world, at the same time as their own private world. People are the artificers of things that occur in the world. The external and the interior worlds collide and the intervention of the senses involves the dynamism of reason in a continuous process of exchange between the real and the ideal. The conference will consider the idea of the contours of the city. The range of papers on subjects such as civic (dis)engagement, parallels between ancient and modern cities, urban rivers and cities of mapping will reflect a strong interdisciplinary ethos. We shall also consider two case studies – Paris and London – and how these cities appear in literature and art.”

Bologna's City Hall-- Palazzo d'Accursio (D. Saitta)

The conference will open at the Capella Farnese in Bologna City Hall. Professor Umberto Eco is expected to deliver a short introduction to the conference. A welcoming letter from Harold Bloom will be read.  Other program details are here.

Capella Farnese, Bologna City Hall

I have the good fortune to participate in a session on “Civic (Dis)Engagement.”  It will provide an opportunity to discuss, for an international audience,  the intercultural sensibilities (or lack thereof) of urban planning and design in the United States and, specifically, Denver.  Shelley Hornstein of York University, Toronto will be a fellow participant. Shelley has a new book dealing with urban memory and place. Her talk will consider how we remember cities by exploring artists’ concepts of demolition, destruction and ruin. Our session conceiver and presiding chair is Elena Lamberti, who has also just published a new book about Marshal McCluhan.

I’m looking forward to all the sessions in a very inspiring program.  The program surely captures the interdisciplinary and intercultural spirit of Giovanna’s vision.  This is also a welcome opportunity to personally honor Giovanna herself. Giovanna was a driving force behind our US Department of Education/European Union sponsored “Atlantis” program to facilitate the exchange of students and scholars between universities in England, Italy, and the United States. The students and scholars coming to DU were certainly instrumental in enriching my course Culture and The City.  They provided refreshing analytical perspectives on Denver’s Civic Center Park and Denver’s New Urbanism.  This blog is a direct outcome of the Atlantis collaboration.

Of course, there are many other joys for a Brooklyn-born kid of Italian ancestry to experience in Bologna besides the company of free-thinking scholars, fabulous architecture, and energizing public spaces:

Market Window, Via Peschere Vecche (D. Saitta)

This entry is filed under General, Urban Studies.

Did the Built Environment Kill Trayvon Martin?

By on March 31, 2012

Or, help kill him?  So asks Planetizen, in advertising an article by Robert Steuteville in Better! Cities and Towns.  Steuteville’s argument is that gated communities like The Retreat at Twin Lakes create “a fortress mentality” replete with paranoia and suspicion of anyone who looks out of place within its walls.  Steuteville notes the development’s very low Street Smart Walk Score of 26 and suggests that “It’s hard to imagine this kind of tragedy playing out today in the same way on the block of a walkable city or town.”

The Retreat at Twin Lakes, Sanford, Florida (Reuters)

Others have made similar arguments. Chris Turner, writing for the Mother Nature Network, suggests that Trayvon’s death was “aided and abetted by a failed urban design model” tragically lacking in what Jane Jacobs described as “eyes on the street.”   The Twin Lakes model is a “drain on social capital and robs neighborhoods of the rich interplay of random, multivalent activities that breeds—and protects—healthy community.”  Turner suggests that among the many sad aspects of Trayvon’s tragedy was “the way that the street failed him.”

And then there’s Rich Benjamin, writing  in yesterdays New York Times.  Benjamin echoes Steuteville by arguing that gated communities  produce a “bunker mentality” and attract “like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion…worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders.”  The gates “exacerbate biased treatment against the young, the colored, and the…poor.”

I certainly think there’s an element of truth to these analyses.  This blog is predicated on the idea that the built environment actively shapes human psychology and behavior, and that our explanations of particular events can suffer unless we consider the materiality of human existence alongside political, economic, and other institutional forces (e.g., the case of Pruitt-Igoe).  But we can also push things too far, as one commentator on the Planetizen announcement noted.  People are killed and assaulted in inclusionary  places, too.  They’re also killed and assaulted in highly walkable places, including those designed and/or infilled along New Urbanist lines. Denver’s Central Business District has a walk score of 96. The Union Station area—which includes our regenerated Lower Downtown (“Lodo”) and the famous Larimer Square—has a walk score of 87.   Yet in the last year assaults in the Central Business District were up 64% and forcible sex offenses were up 73%.  In Union Station assaults were up 43%. Explanations for these findings include the struggling economy, cutbacks in social services, and the availability of fewer civic resources to deal with violent crime.

Eyes on the Street in Larimer Square, Denver

Thus, it’s a bit unseemly to imply that if The Retreat at Twin Lakes had only been more walkable on a New Urbanist model the Trayvon Martin tragedy might have been averted. As Philip Langdon noted in another Better! Cities and Towns piece dealing with death by vehicular accident at Denver’s Stapleton development, “New Urbanists cannot claim that safety is a problem only in conventionally designed [or, we would add, gated] subdivisions.”

This entry is filed under Architecture, General.

The Parking Lot as Public Space

By on March 27, 2012

Yesterday’s Atlantic Wire listed MIT Urban Planner Eran Ben-Joseph’s column in The New York Times called “When a Parking Lot is so Much More” as a top Monday read. The essence of Ben-Joseph’s argument:

The ubiquity of parking lots has…led to an overlooked social dimension: In the United States, parking lots may be the most regularly used outdoor space. They are public places that people interact with and use on a daily basis, whether working, shopping, running errands, eating, even walking — parking lots are one of the few places where cars and pedestrians coexist.

Better parking lots would embrace and expand this role. Already, many lots provide space for farmers’ markets, spontaneous games of street hockey, tailgating, even teenagers’ illicit nighttime parties. This range of activities suggests that parking lots are a “found” place: they satisfy needs that are not yet met by our designed surroundings. Planned with greater intent, parking lots could actually become significant public spaces, contributing as much to their communities as great boulevards, parks or plazas.

A couple of examples are noted. Like this one at the Renzo Piano re-designed Fiat Lingotto factory, apparently Ben-Joseph’s favorite:

Parking Lot at Fiat Lingotto, Turin, Italy

And this one at the Dia art museum in Beacon, New York:

Parking Lot at Dia Art Museum, Beacon, NY

Other lots are described here.  I’m not entirely sure that the features of these parking lots are all that redemptive when it comes to providing public space.  Both seem to privilege the individual pedestrian’s experience over that of a larger social collective. But Ben-Joseph’s basic argument is a good one.  As described elsewhere in this blog, an Intercultural Urbanism often sees, lying within the surface parking lot, a “hard plaza” capable of serving a variety of social and economic functions for cultural groups of varying sizes and with varying interests.

Design guidelines for the  project we’re following here in Denver at 9th and Colorado, however, certainly seem to exemplify the prevailing anti-lot bias.  Walkability is the guiding design value at 9th and Colorado, but so too is “connectivity” and social interaction.  The current guidelines cast surface parking as something to be disguised rather than embraced as active social space.  According to the guidelines, the parking lot’s “visibility” must be “reduced” and its “visual impact” must be “minimized” or “buffered” by streetscape and landscaping elements.  It is forever destined to be “underutilized” until it can be redeveloped and replaced with something else.   “Surface Parking” is categorized as conceptually and functionally distinct from “Publicly Accessible Open Space and Plazas.”  Ben-Joseph does good work in inviting us to think about whether the surface parking lot can’t be a whole lot more.

 

This entry is filed under General. | 3 Comments

A Defeat for Berlin’s BMW-Guggenheim Lab?

By on March 25, 2012

As long as we’re revisiting topics from last August we can’t ignore last week’s big news that the BMW-Guggenheim Lab won’t be opening this coming May in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Local activists mounted a vigorous campaign to stop the installation, and BMW-Guggenheim feared outbreaks of violence and vandalism.  It was originally reported that the public resistance turned on worries that the project would accelerate gentrification of the area, producing  higher rents, resident displacements, and new luxury developments.  Another explanation links the popular protest to majority ownership of BMW by the Quandt family, which has admitted to using forced labor during World War II and whose current BMW operation is the target of a large trade union campaign.

Conceptual Rendering of BMW-Guggenheim Lab in Kreuzberg Vacant Lot (Spiegal Online)

BMW-Guggenheim Lab organizers are now considering other sites in Berlin, including Prenzlauer Berg. This district was originally identified as the Lab’s location.  The area has been undergoing gentrification, however, and that might not send the best message to citizens in Berlin and elsewhere who worry about what corporate-sponsored “pop-ups” portend for their neighborhoods.  Alternatively, how about an unused space near Potsdamer Platz?  Here, there’s a bit of history (described in this blog last August) for corporate-sponsored temporary building serving the cause of healthy public debate about urban regeneration and development.  That history might serve as a useful touchstone for getting “good city” conversations in Berlin off to a better start.

UPDATE, April 7: Prenzlauer Berg gets the nod as the relocation site.

This entry is filed under General.

A Victory for London’s 99%?

By on March 22, 2012

Last August we wondered, in the course of writing about the London riots, whether that city’s 2012 Olympic Games would live up to their billing as the “Regeneration Games” for the blighted East End where they’ll be located. Michael Powell, writing in this week’s New York Times, reports some promising movement on this front.  He describes tactics used by the organization London Citizens to win better-than-minimum-wage jobs for those who’ll work within the Olympic perimeter during the Games, as well as 2000 houses for working class Londoners after the Games have ended.  Some of these are earmarked for the housing-hungry borough of Hackney. Perhaps there are some lessons here for the Occupiers of Denver, and elsewhere?

Olympic Stadium, View from Hackney (Reuters, Eddie Keogh)

This entry is filed under General.

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