To understand the city you need to feel her soil beneath your feet,
to breathe her air, to sample her infinite variety.
- Jonathan Barnes, The Somnambulist
Urbanists learn how a city works through intimate contact with it.
Experience, observation, common sense, and human value are fundamental to an urbanist's view.
-
Roberta Brandes Grantz, Living Cities
Walk around it first. Look at the whole scene inside and out; then make your deductions. Ask yourself what you saw, not what you
expected to see or what you hoped to see, but what you saw
- Superintendent Dalgliesh, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman,
P.D. James
You cannot plan a neighborhood into existence.
You can only plan infrastructure.
If there was one person who inspired how I looked at the urban setting, it was Jane Jacobs. Since her death in April of this year so many others have written about her in ways that I could not, I have hesitated to write about Ms Jacobs and her influence on me. This past Friday, Russell Fernandez of Princeton Architectural Press sent me a review copy of Block By Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York, a collection of contemporary essays about Jane Jacobs by a rather impressive group of cultural critics and writers. ( I will be saying more about the work in my review.) Without even opening the book, the title – Block By Block – stimulated my thinking about how we see the urban setting. If you have followed along with me as I have explored urban neighborhoods you know that one of the problems I have with much of contemporary urban planning is that planners tend to see neighborhoods with the specific blinder of their discipline. In so doing they miss seeing the cultural environment and the sagas and the hopes of the neighborhood.
This pass summer I spent some time wandering about seven blocks of one street in Cleveland: Detroit Road between W. 110th & 117th. Out of that came a photo exhibit entitled "One Street – Seven Blocks." My intent, although I have not yet done so, was to go back to those seven blocks from time to time and observe what is changing and what has remained static and, if possible, observe effect the "change and not-change" has upon those who frequent those blocks. The receipt of Block By Block has served to remind me that I must do so soon.
The three slide shows below are grouped according to the feeling they gave me about the neighborhood. My Urban Photo Essay blog has a link to the thematic exhibit posters in the right hand index under "One Street – Seven Blocks."
The City is a dynamic, living narrative, an unfolding autobiography, a melding of countless invisible stories; raveling, and unraveling, not in words,
but in movement, fear, desire, need, coupling—the daily of living.
The city seen is a narrative painted upon the canvas of the ; meaning – definition – is found
not in the narrative, but in the illegible depths of the unseen city. To think that the 'painting' is the narrative is
delusional. for what is seen is but a incomplete snapshot in time—one fragment of ever-unfolding narrative. Incomplete
because it cannot capture the full dynamic of the moment; limited to the immediate perspective and surround.
Yet we delude ourselves into believing that we can arrange the narrative of 'captured city' in a collage called The City.
Deluded, we seek to manage that which has been captured; convincing ourselves the fiction we write is indeed the real city.
And in so doing, The City ceases to exist.
- From the introduction to Seeing the City with New Eyes.
(Currently soliciting publishers)
Urban Mass
A art and music driven liturgy for the city that plays upon the duel definitions of mass.
Streets
(Verse inspired by urban street life)
old, sad blues notes swirl about;
the band plays on—
engulfing all in her melancholic strains.
a bright note sounds out
here and there,
unable to break free of the drone.
the band all spiffed in their 60's best,
suit button and eye straining
while the band plays on and on,
never going anywhere.
a smack of paint here and there
a new façade
at best,
only hiding the ever-creeping decay.
