Drawing and Reinventing Landscape

• Drawing and Reinventing Landscape, AD Primer on Amazon

It's wonderful having a multitude of full-colour illustrations of mostly non-computerized graphic landscape representations of many types – photographs, pencil drawings, ink and watercolour renderings, charts – in this book; details regarding history and current status of landscape architecture and garden design are interesting and illuminating, as well.

I chose Drawing and Reinventing Landscape because of my lifelong interest in cities and in the process of urbanization, and because of my current work as a graphic artist and designer. Author Diana Balmori has worked in the field of landscape architecture most of her life; her well-deserved degree of renown makes her expertise and perspective especially insightful and valuable.

However, I've removed a star because the text is too tiny for comfort, and its size adds an unattractive sense of miniaturization to the book. In natural light or with reading glasses I can read it easily enough, but a little less information – or the same information expressed more succinctly – would greatly increase the visual appeal. I assume all books in this AD Primer series carry the same general format, but related to my remarks about point size of text, if the publishers were not going to produce this book or the series in a larger format (not necessarily coffee-table size), I'd recommend increasing the font size. But happily, there's still enough literal "white space" on each page for create an altogether pleasing presentation.

• My Amazon review: landscape representation and history

The City as a Tangled Bank

• The City As A Tangled Bank: Urban Design versus Urban Evolution – AD primer (Architectural Design Primer)

The City as a Tangled Bank has taken a permanent place in my growing cities-related library! Terry Farrell, principal of Farrells architect-planners (London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai) brings perspective and wisdom of the kind only a long life of experience and observation can provide! The subtitle implies somewhat of a contest between planning imposed from "outside and above," and growth that occurs from "inside and below" urban space and place, but that expresses it too simply. Along with intro and conclusion, throughout the nine chapters, we learn about the truly endless organic process of letting the city (any city―ancient, young, or in-between) itself show and guide you into what needs to happen for its health and growth―similar to Kevin Lynch's legible city: a city you can read.

Tangled Bank in the title, Evolution in the subtitle both refer to Darwin's Origin of Species. Sir Terry celebrates connecting, communicating, time, layering, adaptation, emergence, and conversion in any urban growth and development process. The author is no fan of Big Architecture, not enthusiastic about Mies, Corbu, et al. After all, that's the type of inorganic, imposed-from without style he decries and dislikes, because it does not spring up from within the urban organism, and is a product of human initiative rather than of the city itself as place-maker―at one point he describes "place as client." If the results are visually attractive, why is that so terrible? Because it does not result in a humanly livable habitat or surroundings.

The bibliography truly is brief, listing five books in the Emergence and Evolution category, a dozen in Urban Design and Architecture, although each chapter includes detailed endnotes. With some in black and white, others full-colour, the many many drawings, photographs, sketches, and maps (with a heavy emphasis on London) enhance the book's clarity and usefulness, helping make it a visual delight. However, I wish the basic text had been printed in a larger type size, and that goes double or triple for the microscopic end notes. Also, physical weight and dimensions make it a nice size to heft. This is not a school textbook or a how-to handbook, so please don't assess it in those terms!

• my amazon review: helping cities become themselves

The Exploding Metropolis

• The Exploding Metropolis on Amazon
There are several versions; most likely you can buy one very inexpensively.

I'm blogging and reviewing the original that's copyright 1958. It has been in my library close to forever but I'm posting my review with the 1993 revision.

A group of "Editors of Fortune" magazine at the time, William H. Whyte, Jane Jacobs, Francis Bello, Seymour Freedgood, and Daniel Seligman considered essential elements of urban design and pondered their effects on city dwellers and urban workers. The book's working definition of city simply is the area within the city limits (viii); almost needless to say, "metropolis" indicates the functional and statistical area or areas geographically beyond yet contiguous to the named incorporated entity.

Exploding sounds like unanticipated, sudden, randomness; if the authors knew they'd seen a lot of that from the mid-20th century up to the time they put this book together, they hadn't seen anything yet, though each of them accurately describes the unexpected, often distressingly unattractive results of urban growth and sprawl—even in some cases of planned change and development. In terms of explosive, the schematic "classic case of sprawl" (on page 119) in Santa Clara County, California from 1945 to 1956 is instructive.

Chapter topics

• Are Cities Un-American?
• The City and the Car
• New Strength in City Hall
• The Enduring Slums
• Urban Sprawl; and
• Downtown is for People

add up to Urban Studies 101 as the authors explore existing infrastructural and superstructural configurations in a dozen established USA population centers (along with a couple of references to Toronto, Ontario, Canada), assess ideas in progress and process, and propose future arrangements that might work in terms of "how to live in cities," the central thesis of The Exploding Metropolis.

This book now is more than a half-century old, but ever since humans began moving from hunter-gathering into settlements, they've had to figure out the best relationships between living space and working space and the most convenient ways to get back and forth from one to the other; planning and implementing the most pleasing, amenable, visual layouts alongside the practical became close to essential.

Jane Jacobs especially emphasizes "working streets," and advises us to walk, walk, walk, in order to feel and learn how the city all comes together.

Whether discussing clearing and developing land, rehabilitating and rebuilding on an existing site, different styles of city government, housing authorities, port authorities, water works or watersheds, every one of the contributors comes back to human scale and human functionality again and again, making The Exploding Metropolis both basic and classic.

• my amazon review: Urban Studies 101

The Image of the City :: Kevin Lynch

• The Image of the City. Kevin Lynch, Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, © 1960

The Legible City—a city you can read! As an iconographer writes rather than draws or paints an icon, a city comprised of colors, shapes, motion, and light can be viewed, read, and interpreted as an environmental image. The picture includes identity (what is it?), structure (space, shape, pattern relation and discrimination), and meaning (emotional, psychological, historical values) from the observer's own experiences. Each image derives from here and now; the city "image also is soaked in memories and meanings." [page 1] And, of course, there's not a single public image of any city, but a series of overlapping and interrelated ones.

From author Kevin Lynch: "This book is about the look of cities, and whether this look is of any importance, and whether it can be changed." This book is "a first word not a last word…" it's "at once tentative and presumptuous." The research method consisted of relatively objective systemic field reconnaissance and relatively subjective interviews with a small sample of mostly professional and managerial city residents. Citizens interviewed in Chapter 2, "Three cities," were exceedingly small samples: 30 in Boston, 15 each in Jersey City and Los Angeles, so these are not necessarily commonly held public images of those cities.

Kevin Lynch and his colleague Gyorgy Kepes researched and wrote this book during the 1950s; since then we've moved from Metropolitan Statistical Areas to a string of Megalopoleis (I found 3 possibilities for the plural of megalopolis and chose this one). At least two Boston features in the book no longer exist: Scollay Square, superseded by Government Center that includes City Hall of still controversial love it or hate it (I adore it) architectural design, and the Central Artery, replaced by the most expensive public works project in history: The Big Dig. But you will find physical structures of paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks in any human population center larger than a village, so they're not necessarily an urban distinctive. "Districts are structured with nodes, defined by edges, penetrated by paths, and sprinkled with landmarks." [pages 48-49]

The five chapters include:

• The Images of the Environment

• Three Cities—Boston, Jersey City, Los Angeles. In each case, studies came from a small central area of 2.5 x 1.5 miles.

• The City Image and Its Elements

• City Form

• A New Scale

Appendices are sufficient to make another short book:

• Some References to Orientation

• The Use of the Method

• Two Examples of Analysis [Beacon Hill and (the late) Scollay Square, Boston]. There's also a bibliography and index. Margins throughout the book include many many line drawings and there are quite a few Black and White photographs.

In terms of future cities The Image of the City might influence, "We have an opportunity of forming our new city world into an imageable landscape: visible, coherent, and clear." By definition a city is multi-purpose with mixed functions yet with "fundamental functions of which the city forms may be expressive: circulation, major land-uses, key focal points. [pages 9-92] The common hopes and pleasures, the sense of community may be made flesh. Above all, if the environment is visibly organized and sharply identified… it will become a true place, remarkable and unmistakable."

As a handbook about present and about possibilities, "what we seek is not a final but an open-ended order, capable of continuous further developments" [page 8] The Image of the City "is about the look of cities, and whether this look is of any importance, and whether it can be changed," but appearance is an immeasurably critical part of the infrastructure that supports all the activities of the urban enterprise, the work, play, school, and home lives of the city's citizens. A city's physical appearance and the emotional responses that arise from it can be the reason someone wants to move there or the reason they long to leave. "The map, whether exact or not, must be good enough to get one home." [page 9]

Close to the end Kevin Lynch reminds us of Susanne Langer and gives us her definition of architecture: "the total environment made visible." Remember Langer's Philosophy in a New Key where she writes about our human need for symbols and our need to symbolize, to invent and invest meanings in objects, our environments, our activities, and our world?

These are shapes, spaces, and vistas that will – or won't – attract new artistic, educational, and commercial enterprises; no wonder this book is a classic! Kevin Lynch's prose is dryer than I'd prefer, but it is what it is, and if someone doesn't write like a poet, they don't. I'll give The Image of the City a high recommend to read and to read again.

• my amazon review: The Legible City

Welcome to the City!

On a couple of my other blogs I've posted some old material; the following paragraphs are from a short-lived site on the MSN pages I hosted during summer 2000 and so fun to remember and think about. I'm blogging the introduction here, and then posts on the three topics we actually developed, in topical order rather than jumbled according to date. In what used to be my almost usual social-scientist identity (whatever happened? It got outpaced by the theologian, I guess), I initiated the subjects we discussed.

Welcome to The City!
Welcome to The City! Whether you've always been a city person, whether you live in a suburb or rural area and wouldn't have it any other way, whether you come to the city mainly for fun – to see the sights, hear the sounds, shop the stores, enjoy the restaurants, have an out-of-the-ordinary experience – you'd probably like to join our virtual city! We'd love to have you, and you probably have lots and lots of ideas and opinions to contribute. Welcome!

The City and Distributive Justice
From: Leah (Original Message) Sent: 8/23/2000 12:27 PM

Who gets what, why, when, how and where in terms of goods and services long has been and continues to remain the central focus of life in the city for many people. This has always been so in any geopolitical area with a distinct income disparity between different groups and different individuals. Globally, of course, but also in the "First World."

In the United States we see it in striking terms, striking because there exists such splendid wealth back-to-back with such indescribable poverty. "Why" probably is the first question. Individual income combined with the inefficient and short reach of governmental and private not-for-profit agencies first come to mind as primary factors. But there are people living in the inner city with adequate incomes who have known only a culture of poverty and who therefore choose either consciously or unconsciously to continue that lifestyle.

From: Aisha in response to Message 1 Sent: 8/29/2000 11:14 PM

America's foundation is built on the many backs that we step on or stab to get to where we are today. It's definitely survival to the fittest. This is not a democratic country. There is no such thing. Democracy would only be successful if everyone wanted the same thing for everyone else...Pure equality. That will never be. Because there's always someone that wants you to kiss their ass.

On the other spectrum, there are so many spineless jellyfish out there that are willing to do it. Fighting for beliefs or rights has become about as faddish as bell-bottoms. The rich will be the "haves" while the poor will be the "have nots." When the "have nots" finally get tired of pressing their noses against the windows of the "haves" lives, that's when the division will stop. Knowledge is power. If everyone could empower themselves and their children with the will that you can be successful no matter where you're from, then we can ALL receive equal justice.

The Arts in Inner City Boston
From: Leah (Original Message) Sent: 8/26/2000 1:38 PM

Living in Boston this summer, I've experienced an incredibly rich diversity in what might be called the "popular arts." The music takes two basic forms: live and impromptu (Gospel, soul, hip-hop, steel drums, rap, and probably some forms I don't recognize) and recorded CDs. Some of the CDs blast forth from houses, cars, or boomboxes on foot, some of them are simply background to whatever activity is in progress, for all ages, any age. And the CDs are quite likely to contain what's generally called "objectionable lyrics," as well as evoking very definitely objectionable images.

I'll comment just briefly on the visual arts. To me, they're far more exciting than the music. Colorful, representational paintings on the sides of buildings, on trash cans, on sidewalks. And of course, the large paintings the local daycamps and preschools turn out—some of them are very well done!

In contrast to the Inner City Arts are the Downtown Arts. Some more sophisticated, professional versions of what we have here in the inner city, but downtown one also can find classical concerts, free and not, as well as museums, most of which charge an admission price way out of the range of most of the people around where I live. However, there are a few cost-free times at some of the museums, but unfortunately it's still a hefty price to get into the special exhibits.

Metro Area Population
From: Leah (Original Message) Sent: 8/19/2000 6:46 AM

I'm concerned that the high price of good housing in most cities will be sending people out of the Metro/Central City area to less expensive, but also less desirable and attractive neighborhood and housing. Part of my concern includes the very real possibility of more affluent people and families moving into the vacated housing, rehabbing it, and increasing the value not only of their own housing, but also of the housing stock in the surrounding neighborhoods.

From: Aisha in response to Message 1 Sent: 8/20/2000 8:57 PM

I live in Georgia. Suburban "sprawl" has affected every area of our state. No community is really safe. Even though there is more money being brought into the less desirable communities, the prices have been skyrocketing. Whoever has the gold holds the key...

From: Leah in response to Aisha

You said it perfectly: "Whoever has the gold, holds the key..." Community organizing is the only answer that has any chance at all. People may think it's behind the times, but if bunches of people would get out there, they'd find it works!

From: Torrie in response to Message 1 Sent: 8/25/2000 4:30 AM

It seems that here, in Ohio, the cost of housing is less expensive within the city. There are a few exceptions—German Village, Victorian Village, Italian Village. The cost of housing in the suburbs is skyrocketing—along with increased property taxes. Property taxes alone consume 30% of my monthly mortgage.

New Mood Downtown

Downtown Chicago with Legal Reuse Rights

A really really old one, spunoff some from our very first assignment when I decided to begin a second bachelor's degree. The course was introductory sociology; we got to go to the university library and choose an article from journals the professor had on reserve. Of course I had to choose something very urban: Society, v. 16 no. 6 pp. 4,6-7, September-October 1979

• New Mood Downtown: internet link
• Wolf Von Eckardt, New Mood Downtown
• Society: v. 16 no. 6 pages 4, 6-7 September-October 1979

This article is concentrated and conclusive regarding positive aspects of the current migration back into the cities as a place to live. Von Eckardt shows a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for city living. Reflecting on contemporary trends, he cites everything now [1979 for the article's date] happening in a most positive light, taking negatives exclusively from the 30 to 40 years preceding the back-to-city-living trend. Although the article is only three pages long and therefore limited in scope and depth, the author seems almost obsessively intent on proving his point and extending his own enthusiasm to the reader.

The essential thesis appears to be that use – or misuse – of architectural space is the prime humanizing or dehumanizing factor. Beginning with the fact of the physical return of people from suburbia to cities, and ending with the observation that it is people who are beginning to make their environment livable and workable, the writer lists a series of factors that contribute to the neglect and decay of the city:

• residential exodus/flight to suburbs
• suburban shopping centers
• freeways
• exit of industry
• poorer people remaining in the city
• suburbs receiving a lot of tax money
• "urban renewal" attacking the apparent, visible problem of substandard housing rather than the real problem of limited employment skills and opportunities

Von Eckardt sees the extensive implementation of housing modeled after Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse as the worst mistake, observing that the concept of stark concrete slabs surrounded by air and light in reality was unable to provide the casual, routine social interaction needed for development of a healthy community. Again, in negative terms, he indicates that unique architectural style not so much reinforced and perpetuated whatever sense of alienation already may have been present, but was a major contributory factor in its emergence, as the style allowed for no functional neighborhoods.

Among positive forces now at work – presented both as a response or reaction to Corbu's style of architecture and as an awareness that possibly we were in danger of losing the "good old" things about the city – the author mentions particularly the rediscovery of the neighborhood as a social setting and the multitude of creatively revived downtown shopping centers. His only reservation seems to be the suggestion of a need to find a solution for the problem of gentrification of lower-class housing and the subsequent displacement of people already living there.

The limitations of a short article better serve the purpose of either a general, broad overview or of a concise unilateral view as presented in this article than that of a thorough presentation of multiple aspects of a situation. Although Von Eckardt's bias comes through forcefully, he also succeeds well in portraying the renewed cities as most attractive and as definitely the place to live.

Because of the relative terseness of Von Eckardt's exposition of the urban revival phenomenon, and because he documents it will with specific examples of decay, demolition, revival and rebuilding, the article is both informative and convincing. Written in easily readable non-technical language, it incorporates virtually all of the observations I've read in popular literature over the past two or three years.

Though never stated overtly, overlaying the focus on architecture as the apparent major factor in the city's crisis/rebirth is an implied awareness that life happens and can be lived only in community. The architectural accidentals that at first seem to be Von Eckardt's central concern thereby can be seen as enabling and facilitating community.

© Leah Chang

Partners

Partners on amazon, with eight chapters, each in two parts: Part One: Neighborhood Revitalization through Partnership; Part Two: Whittier Neighborhood, a Minneapolis Case Study.

More than ten years after its publication in 1982, at one of the annual Salt Lake City Neighborhood Conferences I received a copy of this soft-cover, 11.7"x9.1"x0.8" explorative report on revitalization of the Whittier section of Minneapolis. It's printed on heavy, coated paper, and it's packed with narrative, with Black and White and color photographs, diagrams, charts, and general inspirations. I'm reading myself and my current situation into some words about the USA from the Prologue that could apply to many individuals:

"This book is about the end of an era and the beginning of a new possibility. The era it leaves behind was 'on the road,' mobile, going anywhere, celebrating space. The possibility it welcomes is 'coming home,' rooting, creating a stake, celebrating place."

"Neighborhood is about place. It declares that one special place is the foundation for life's living. America 'on the move' was hard on places, whether prairies or forests or older cities. This is the story of a new generation that came home and found a way to recover a place that had been misused by old-fashioned Americans. It is about a beginning, a possibility, a way people act when place really matters." [iv]

In the wake of famously misguided attempts by government and by private investors to remedy real problems of inner city decay, neighborhood decline, and infrastructure deterioration, Dayton-Hudson (now Target Corporation) partnered with residents, businesses, local government and other entities to help the actual people of Whittier revitalize and reclaim the community for themselves by creating a home, a place to be, during the 1970s.

Partners is a fascinating study about people power, grass roots action, and the resurgence of hope and life. Three decades later, this book is hardly dated at all, and still would be useful and instructive for any urban studies, American studies, sociology, or cultural anthropology course.

my amazon review: creating home

Detroit City Is the Place to Be

• Detroit City is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli on Powells

• Mark Binelli's website


Is "afterlife" death? Is it a variety of living modified by the adjective after—meaning in the wake of something else? You've probably heard of urban prairies and renatured yards.

Like all great cities, Le Détroit du Lac Érie began and then flourished along a river—the Detroit River is both a river and a strait between Lakes St Clair and Erie.

This book chronicles the place that became the Motor City from its founding in 1701, follows with its growth in population, economic importance, and global impact. Binelli describes Detroit's decline and outlines some of the reasons. And no, Detroit doesn't resemble any postcolonial African state.

I've previously blogged about how Detroit draws me. Family of origin on the side I know something about hailed from Detroit. As a seventh grader I took my first solo flight (as a passenger) to Detroit. Attended my first MLB game at Tiger Stadium, RIP 2009. Those facts relate to my lifelong passion for cities in general, my lifelong resolve to beautify the inner city, and my adult sense of call to serve the urban church.

Binelli's bona fides include growing up in a Detroit suburb and becoming acquainted with the city proper when he worked for his family business as a teen. His reasonably objective perspective as a mainstream journalist is another asset. He moved there to get firsthand experience of Detroit's afterlife; the resulting field reports clarify the human cost of the past and illuminate hope for the future

Detroit City is the Place to Be is copyright 2012. It's now 2023. The prose and characters engaged me, but without an updated sequel the book left me hanging. Not in terms of wanting more of what I'd already read, but because I need to know about now. I've read about the city exiting bankruptcy. I know a little about neighborhood farms and river restoration projects. I rejoice that wildlife again is at home along the river, but I can't feel what's going on. I often tell people I'd relocate to Detroit if it weren't for the weather. Is living there the best way to discover what's transpired during the past decade? "Imported from Detroit" became an American auto industry buzz-phrase. How about if I expatriate myself to Detroit?

On page 95 the author quotes Corine Vermeulen: "the birthplace of modernity and the graveyard of modernity." I fully trust "…hope literally growing from the fallow soil of the post-industrial necropolis." [page 56] Renatured yards and urban prairies because… nature has a way of stripping away the past and opening doors to newness.

• My Amazon Review: Urban Prairies, Renatured Yards, Revitalized City

Downtown Detroit skyline from Windsor, Ontario
by Ken Lund on Flickr

Public Policy :: A Concise Introduction

• Public Policy: A Concise Introduction, 1st Edition, by Sara R Rinfret, Denise Scheberle, and Michelle C Pautz on Amazon

With my formal classroom learning about public policy having been back in the twentieth century, I decided to get up to date with this college textbook overview of the near-countless topics, agencies, elected/appointed officials and other actors involved in governing, administrating, changing, and influencing humanity and the environment—primarily in the USA. Just as with any textbook for an introductory course, it covers areas a student probably knows something about and ones they may never have heard of.

Emphases on the environment and on immigration are the major differences in this book from when I was in school. The trio of university-level instructor contributors do well explaining interaction among various public entities coupled with the frequent role of corporations and not-for-profits. Chapters ail include objectives, case studies, charts and other graphics, glossary/vocabulary terms, discussion questions, and resource suggestions, all of which can be helpful to a student, instructor, or an independent reader like myself. End of book features a glossary with brief definitions of terms used in the book, chapter-by-chapter print and digital resources, and an index.

Public Policy: A Concise Introduction will stay on my bookshelf because in many cases looking it up in a book is easier than scrolling through the internet, and because nothing feels better than an open book in my hands. My only concern is the comprehensive breadth and density along with new vocabulary words to learn, new concepts to unpack, might overwhelm a student who was new to the study of public policy.

• My Amazon Review: comprehensive overview