Rebel Metropolis | Monthly Archives: October 2013

Revisiting ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’

William H. Whyte was ‘an American urbanist, organizational analyst, journalist and people-watcher.’ You’ve likely heard the oft quoted line, “It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.” That was William H. Whyte.

In the 1970’s, Whyte assembled a group of researchers and filmmakers to apply academies of cultural anthropology to modern urbanites and the way they interact with each other in metropolitan space. His team recorded gender, age, weather, time of day, time of year, temperature, body language, types of conversation, mimicking behavior – and all the various ways fountains, chairs, stair case size, railing shape, and bench height effect all manner of human behavior.

Seagram Square, a successful urban gathering place.

Within the produced film, Whyte offers astute conclusions drawn from the exhausting volumes of data his team collected. The analysis is shocking in its commonality. People abhor wide open space, moving across them quickly to get to somewhere else – yet people love to linger in small spaces, nooks, alcoves – nestled closely regardless of whether they’re familiar with one another. Most predominantly, people really like to sit down.

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Would Space Aliens Think Cars Are the Dominant Species?

A colleague of mine recently asked me who came up with the line, “If aliens came to Earth, they’d probably think cars were the dominant life form.” I’d heard this line before, but had no clue who coined it. After about ten seconds of digging, I found this little gem of a remastered film from the National Film Board of Canada directed and animated by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal in 1966 entitled ‘What On Earth!‘

The film takes an albeit dated yet satirical look at car culture, including the destruction of urban structures to allocate more room for space-hogging cars. It even casts humans as parasites that get in the way of automobiles, preventing them from fulfilling their dreams of going absolutely everywhere, terrain be damned.

oehttp://www.nfb.ca/film/what_on_earth/

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It’s Time to Stop Sharing the Road

You’ve heard it ad nauseam: Share the Road – a mantra adopted much by cyclists and not at all by motorists. It’s become a passive petition: vulnerable bicyclists begging for enough street space to not be run over and killed from drivers largely indifferent due the empathy-crushing confines of the metal machines they drive. Even worse, groups like Please Be Kind to Cyclists have taken this kind of Stockholm Syndrome to absurd extremes, using language that would embolden any bully, ceding them power over their pleading victim.

The PC urban professional crowd you see on their corporate sponsored, helmet-required tours will shun assertive language and cling to a vocabulary of non-confrontationalism. For them, reputation and obedience are more important than responding to clueless motorists and their lethal driving habits with equal and opposite force. Whether in the streets or in our ongoing discourse, the tendency is to back down, to let the oppressor define the rules of engagement and debate. That kind of power dynamic has gotten us basically nowhere.

The burden of mortality is always on the person riding a bike, yet the burden of responsibility for using a car to kill or maim a person virtually never falls on the driver. If that pisses you off, it’s time to start acting like it. We’ve come to a point where all the soft-ball pitching of our needs has failed to deliver streets that are safer. Asking for permission to ride without fear doesn’t work – motorists don’t care, or they can’t hear you. It’s time to start adopting principles of two-wheeled liberation.

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Photographing Metropolitan Topography

“Forget the damned motor car, build the cities for lovers and friends.”
~ Lewis Mumford

Similar to a piece I wrote recently highlighting the ongoing photographic documentation of bicycle culture, it seemed appropriate to also compile a collection of images detailing the various textures and surfaces of urban landscapes. So often as we traverse our cities we’re distracted by our own cellphones, by noise pollution, by dangerous motorized traffic. So seldom can we simply sit an observe goings on around us – taking in all the contours and angles fabricated by buildings grand and slight, layered over one another.

A recent writing focus of several PDX urban scholars has been the gentrifying force of high-rise development, and the socially degrading ‘vertical gated communities‘ it creates. The images presented below reveal some of this, but focus more on the human scaled city with its complex nooks and hidden recesses. Often, opposing structures exist side by side, representing diametric philosophies of proportion and function. These images are presented without commentary and are open to interpretation. What stands out here for me is the photography itself, the forms and terrain – layers of brick and concrete fabric we’re familiar with, yet so seldom have time in our day to pause and evaluate.

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‘Scorched Earth Urbanism’ and other Quasi-Satirical Street Vocabularies

When defining a new term, or redefining a marginalized term, it helps to define its converse. The word ‘sustainable’ has become such a meaningless marketing brand. If we’re going to take this one back from the PR firms we’ll need to draw a few lines. The opposite of ‘sustainable’ should be understood to be ‘terminal’. So often, though, the term ‘sustainable’ is being used where ‘terminal’ should rightly go. ‘Sustainable development’ on a finite planet seems comically dishonest. ‘Smart growth’, ‘green capitalism’ – it’s all a smokescreen. We’ll likely never have anything close to a sustainable metropolis. Like an ant hill, the larger our mega-cities loom, the further its resources must be imported. A few community gardens won’t radically alter much. Maybe Detroit can ramp up wide-scale urban farming, we’ll see.

Anyhow, with so many words being tossed around with dubious authenticity, it seemed fitting to play a little game of fill-in-the-blank ‘Mad-Lib Urbanism‘. Not that this is a thing yet, but it could be. The idea being you can juxtapose just about any word alongside ‘urbanism’ nowadays and potentially create an entirely new process or school of thought.

This rising trend seems to have taken root recently – likely in part to beloved academic geographer David Harvey rekindling the romanticism of Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre. From Harvey in 2008, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: It is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”

So many different brands of ‘urbanism’ have emerged, and most not as new movements, but as a new way to label something that’s been around for a long time. It’s a fun trend to explore, as it can instantly introduce creative new theories of how we live and connect. While this lexicon includes actual studied references, others may be a bit less than sincere. For now, let’s just enjoy the ride.

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