Creature of the Shade

left vs. north: imagining the city

I've been chatting with Dan Hill, author of the seriously urbanist blog City of Sound, about how people imagine and remember the city, town, or area where they live.

Many years ago, a female colleague and I were driving around a Bay Area city that we both knew very, very well.  We were looking for a particular restaurant that she remembered being good.  I asked her what street it was on.  She didn't remember that, but she remembered: "You turn left at the flagpole."

rickshaws in calcutta

A WorldHum piece by Michael Yessis links to a Calvin Trillin article about the proposed abolition of rickshaws in Kolkata (Calcutta), clearly referring to hand-drawn rickshaws as opposed to cycle- or auto-rickshaws.   Trillin quotes the mayor as saying that it's offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.”

I had to add this comment:

india: sounds

Teresa asks:

Reading these posts on India I find myself wondering: what does it all
sound like? Out in the streets, at night, at noon, in the large stone
buildings, inside the police station, for example. The mad surge
forward you speak of must have attendant noise of some kind. And I find
myself entertaining various sounds in my mind.

welcome, gordon price readers

If you've arrived via Gordon Price's link on his website Price Tags, welcome!  Let me show you around.

First of all, if you'd like a blog strictly on urbanism, then click on the category "Streets of Thought" at right.  This will largely protect you from all the other personal obsessions that I might otherwise lead you into, such as botany, travel, spirituality and creative writing.  We're in the midst of a series on India at the moment.

You might also enjoy some of my better older things.  The "City Essays" link over on the left takes you to essays from 2000-03 about individual cities.  (They currently reside in the somewhat tawdry environment of epinions.com, which treats all cities as products and also tends to forget how to format apostrophes and European characters over time; I will eventually find them a new home.)   A collection of my 1990s work on travel and placehood, including several early pieces on California and Australia, is here, in an old site that I can no longer edit.  Don't use the email pointer there; use the one here instead.

Hope you enjoy.  Do tell me what you think.

on jan gehl's plan for sydney

My old friend Gordon Price, the former Vancouver City Councilman who now writes and teaches on urban planning issues, posted some quick comments of mine on the Jan Gehl plan for the Sydney CBD.  I'll try to post more on this as soon as I get India out of my system.

the flaneur in delhi

When I arrive in a city that's new to me, my first desire is to take a day-long, mapless walk.  I start wherever I am, pick a general direction that leads me more or less toward the center of things, but then let my route can be guided my hundreds of tiny impulses about which seems more interesting, this way or that.    In short, I try to be a flaneur -- "a deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency" in Cornelia Otis Skinner's definition. (I wrote here, a while back, about being a flaneur in Sydney.)

learning from las vegas

I should hate Las Vegas, of course.  I go there occasionally to see my father’s family, but I shouldn’t like it.  Sprawling, car-dependent, water-wasting, Las Vegas is almost gleefully unsustainable, and its veneer of family tourism barely conceals an economy where addiction is king.

Yet walking the Strip last month, and driving it again late at night, it was hard to sustain my disapproval.  In its hurling energy the Strip reminded me of giant annual herbs, like the banana tree, designed to burn itself out and collapse in short order. 

The metaphor is wrong as ecology – plenty of unsustainable destruction is bound up in Las Vegas’s cycles of revision – but the admiration I have for banana trees, their ability to hurl themselves to tree-size without any of the trappings of permanence, resembles the feeling of walking the Las Vegas Strip where virtually nothing is 10 years old, where everything is an endless novelty, and where today’s new towers are dwarfed only by construction cranes promising bigger and better tomorrow.

A generation ago, every student of urbanism or architecture read Robert Venturi’s 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas.  In a now-familiar attention-grabbing move, Venturi, an architect, sought meaning in a place that the intelligentsia had scorned, in this case the hotel-casinos, parking lots, and enormous flashing signs of Las Vegas Strip. Las Vegas, he argued, heralded a new but perfectly legitimate aesthetic, one that we had all better study to be ready for the future.

The book made me notice that I usually give my own environmental values a veto power over my sense of beauty and ugliness. To me, a hot-desert city designed to waste water and power was simply delusional, and there was no point in arguing about the aesthetic merits of a delusion. I resented Venturi lumping me in with a paper-tiger intelligentsia condemning Las Vegas as ugly, but if asked I’d have said yes, any human landscape that conditions its citizens to expect unlimited cheap supplies water, power, and oil was ugly by definition. I don’t always conflate the true with the beautiful, and the delusional with the ugly; I’m vastly receptive to fantasy in literature and film, and I did a degree in theatre after all. But a city is a major act of collective imagining, one that conditions its citizens to unconscious habits even more than mass-media do. An efficient city with no imagination is dull – think Singapore – but a city founded on delusions about the capacity of its land is suicidal, and even in my most operatic moments I don’t entertain aesthetic comparisons between different kinds of suicide.

Although Venturi intended Learning from Las Vegas as an aesthetic study, the book is typical of much anti-environmental writing on urban issues. The core move is to treat environmental concerns as aesthetic arguments, and then take a long view in which these arguments look narrow and contingent.  Since aesthetic judgments are always culturally relative, this isn’t hard to do.  This move -- ridiculing environmental judgments as though they were aesthetic ones -- is sadly common these days; Robert Bruegmann's Sprawl: A Concise History is an especially painful example, of which more in another post.

But back to Las Vegas. Seen from the air, its sprawl is disastrous, engendering permanent vehicle dependence on a massive scale. But in its heart(s), and its face to the world, Las Vegas has rediscovered pedestrian scale, and swept Venturi into the ashheap.

Of the major Strip hotels that Venturi studied in the 1970s, most have now been demolished and rebuilt on a larger scale, and even today the working hotels are haunted by ghostly cranes promising still larger towers in the future. Whereas the old Strip was a standard suburban fantasy, where each property is its own unrelated composition behind a parking lot, today’s Strip hotels reach toward each other with walkways and courtyards to create a vast continuous pedestrian realm. Competing hotels find that they both come out ahead if people can walk from one to the other, and even further ahead if they plug into public transport, including both the sexy casino-funded monorail and the unremarkable but packed double-decker buses that ply the street. The effect is an extraordinary massing of pedestrians typical of San Francisco, New York, and other similar bastions of urban intellectuals.

There’s plenty to dislike about Las Vegas, but as I walked the Strip, I had to acknowledge that from a purely urbanist perspective, the city was reaching out to me, welcoming me as a pedestrian. The Las Vegas economy is still founded on addiction, but at least it has discovered the value of intense development and the pedestrian realm it creates. This new principle of design, more than the ostensible new preoccupation with “family” entertainment, is what makes the Strip seem so much less sleazy than the place Robert Venturi and I both knew in the 1980s.  And I admit, I even contributed to the new economy, buying a latte and a margarita in the course of the afternoon; I’d never have done that if I’d had to drive there.

the eternal city

Not even Paris is eternal, but the French have a special genius for making the unchanging seem new.  (Elsewhere and long ago I theorized that genuine placehood is rooted in the experience of arrival, a kind of built-in capacity for welcoming.)  I lived in the Marais ("swamp") district of Paris in 1986, a warren of medieval streets, unblasted by Haussmann, that serves as a hub of both Jewish and gay life while still retaining all the necessary functions of a village.  Today, a friend writes of his trip there this year, and speaks only of things that haven't changed in those 21 years:

I think our Paris is not the place most Americans know, though we did miss a turn and stumbled into St-Germain, and the Metro forces one into the maelstrom of Les Halles and Chatelet -- but that's Paris too, as is the throng of people on the steps up at Sacre-Coeur, though that's a more subdued bunch. 'Our' Paris has more to do with the Marais, that quarter bounded by the Hotel de Ville and Beaubourg to the West and the Bastille to the East. It includes the Jewish quarter, and secluded enclaves where neighbors meet, like Place des Vosges -- where it's OK to lie about on the grass! There's the bit down by the Seine where the Jardin des Plantes leads up to the Muslim Institute and Mosque. No one seems to go there, which is just fine!  They all miss an exquisite tea room. Well, I could go on, yes? You must sense those spaces......and the light of evening on the Seine.

An important measure of Paris is the abundance of rich and specific places that do not need the narcissistic mirror of tourism to see themselves.  My friend's itinerary, including by all means the detour to the anonymous shopping-dungeon of Les Halles and the endless underground corridors of Chatelet Metro station, is as perfect a tour as any Fodor's could devise. 

"how could sydney get it so wrong?"

Elizabeth Farrelly says it all today about the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry.  Certainly she nails the idea that cities blessed with natural beauty seem to have more trouble taking care of their looks.  The article could almost be about the San Francisco - Los Angeles rivalry, or the Seattle-Portland one. 

golden beeryness

Meredith writes:

I'd never stopped to consider the Australian city "template" before but now see that it is just that. I've only been to Perth a couple of times but remember it chiefly for its vivid whiteness... whereas Sydney has that dirty sandstone colour, Melbourne is all blue-grey, and Brisbane is infused with a golden beeryness.

I love the idea that Australian cities are so similar that their differences can be reduced to colors, like different paint jobs on the same pre-fab house.  Of course, there is more than that, but the sources of difference seem to be mostly geography and age, not culture.  I don't think I've ever heard a North American try to sort cities purely by color, but Australians, having less color in nature, may naturally be more attuned to it.