Life in the Livable City

Cities as energy

DL — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:22:27 +0000

Cities are bodies of energy that reflect, deflect, and capture, disperse, and intertwine the energies of the people who live there. City streets are rivers of energy, sometimes tranquil, sometimes raging torrents, more often a tangle of cross energies that form and reflect the human relationships that give birth to city neighborhoods, always fluctuating in tone, temperature, tonal quality, always flowing. Open spaces gather and disperse a city’s energy where streets meet and buildings step back to provide an envelope containing the energy, capable of transforming the energy through the arrangement and treatment of their designs.

DL — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 14:17:45 +0000

The city is entering that hunkering down part of the year, where the physical infrastructure of the place goes into a hard freeze while people and traffic continue to elbow through the streets, a bit grittier than before, cold, somehow noisier but maybe less frantic. Gotta get the gingkos up before they become part of the hard freeze grit.

70 Degrees in the City

DL — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 21:33:49 +0000

Playgrounds teeming with children. Life returns to the civic plaza. Sidewalk cafes suddenly reappear. As winter takes a brief reprieve, the buildings empty and the public spaces fill with people soaking up the sudden sunshine. 70 degrees in the city on a winter’s day.

Posted with WordPress from the sidewalk.

Prana in Place

DL — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:01:14 +0000

The National Mall is a place designed with power in mind, but it dissipates energy in a rapid and discomfiting way. Its large expanse that opens to the sky and sweeps upward at both ends acts as a vacuum against the frail human energy that tries to occupy the place and to understand it at a human level. In Central Park, in the Sheep’s Meadow, energy swirls around the space, bathing sun worshipers in the communal prana that is born there, shaped there, and contained in the expanse by the groves of trees that surround it.

the Prana of Place

DL — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 00:39:04 +0000

Several years ago in New York, I was visiting one of my favorite public spaces, Paley Park. I had studied it years ago in architecture school, and I like to stop by there on occasion. It is a magical place, one of those special spots that make me well up when I’m there, just because the scale and design of the place are exactly right, human, comfortable, all-encompassing. On this recent visit, I was there with my wife and we were basking in the dappled sunlight that made it through the trees onto the pavement below, when a passing tourist unaware of the park’s existence turned his head to the right as he noticed the opening in the building wall. He stopped in his tracks and let out an audible “ahhh.” It brought tears to my eyes. I had the same experience more recently when I visited the High Line. These special places capture the energy of the universe in such a way as to radiate it back on their inhabitants with a powerful positive force. Yoga teaches that all living beings harbor and emanate energy, and that this energy is shared with all other living beings. You can feel this energy in good places, especially good public places; bad public places disperse and disrupt it. The living universe has energy and places capture, mold, disperse, or otherwise move that energy around in ways that we can sense and that affect the energy that emanates from deep within ourselves. In yoga, prana is energy. In public space, place is the way that architects harness that energy into shapes, forms, and open spaces that deeply affect us and can add greatly to the quality of our lives.

District of Columbia Streetwork Redefines Neighborhood Center

DL — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:26:28 +0000

Washington, DC

(originally published January 11, 2010)

The District of Columbia Department of Transportation’s recent Park Road, NW streetscape project has begun to redefine the notion of neighborhood center in two adjacent District neighborhoods that have a distant and tenuous relationship. The neighborhoods, Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, now find themselves close sisters in the hysteria of redevelopment that has defined Columbia Heights for the past five years.

Part of a major streetscape project in Columbia Heights that also includes the 14th Street commercial area, a recently completed section of Park Road, NW, between 14th and Mount Pleasant Streets, offers new sidewalks and streetlights that physically and visually unite the centers of the two neighborhoods into one. And neighborhood residents have slowly started to take notice. Business has picked up along Park Road, where new businesses have joined long timers and the entire block face is about to get a face lift as well.

Designed as an extension of the public space improvements underway near the Tivoli Theater, the Park Road work cements Mount Pleasant Street with the new development around the Columbia Heights Metro Station, with Park Road serving as an active pedestrian way.

The street is more attractive, feels safer, and visually unites 14th Street with Mount Pleasant Street. The amenities of each street complement one another to form a more complete neighborhood center than would be possible one without the other. Together they have Metro and excellent uptown, downtown, and cross town bus service, groceries, restaurants, retail stores, a library, and an exciting new civic plaza, in the type of walkable center that is so much the desire of surrounding jurisdictions. What Columbia Heights-Mount Pleasant has, but is missing in suburban new towns, is the real city grit that comes from the close mixture of cultures that converge in this most vibrant part of the city.

Your neighborhood is where you wander, and where you wander is where you live. My neighborhood includes both 14th Street and Mount Pleasant Street, and Park Road’s new streetscape opens a vibrant connection between the familiar places on either side and redefines each into a new, greater, and more lively and satisfying whole.

Car-free in DC

DL — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 20:07:40 +0000

Car-free living is almost too common to be hip anymore. But when we first decided to live without wheels, we felt stranded and our friends backed slowly away from us, afraid that they might catch whatever it was that we had. After all, how irresponsible to bring up children in the city without a car, by choice. We’ve been car-free for six of the ten years we’ve lived in DC, first choosing to go without a car in early 2000, and we’ve raised two children successfully without one. It seems normal now, and seems like lots of people are doing it. DC is a more transit-rich city now than it was then, our choices expanded greatly from subway or bus. Back in 2000, Flexcar was this new idea called car-sharing (before Zipcar) and all buses were local. The Downtown Circulator didn’t yet exist and there was no bike share program. Not to mention, there was nothing to buy within city limits.

Now, when we decide to travel around the city or beyond its borders, we ask ourselves, “How should we get there?” And the answer more often than not is not to drive at all. We have a Zipcar parked right behind our rowhouse, but we hardly ever use it compared to the number of trips we take on foot, by bus and subway, or in a taxicab. When we drive, we do so only because there is no other way to reach our destination and no closer alternative to going there. Driving, we have found over time, is most often not the more convenient or pleasurable way to go.

Car-free living is a joy. No car payments, don’t care about the price of gas. Insurance bill is zero dollars every month. And we never have to find a parking space or an honest mechanic. Whenever we need to go somewhere, we step out the door and choose a bus or a train or our own two feet to get there. The money we save every month can go to the use of a Zipcar if we really need it or to the occasional taxi. Transportation is no longer near the top of our list for monthly outlay. And now that the city has shopping again and a huge range of transport options, car-free living is no longer the chore that it was in 2000 when our car was driven away from the curb in front of our house – by someone else.

Car-free living is almost too common to be hip anymore, but it is hip enough for our family of four who grew up in the city without any wheels to call our own, but with the entire world within reach of our rowhouse.

The Right of Way in the Right of Way

DL — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:34:41 +0000

This summer on bike to work day, I was hit by a bike while crossing the street in a clearly marked crosswalk. The cyclist darted out from behind the driver who had dutifully stopped at the stop sign that the cyclist decided didn’t apply to him. After all, it was bike to work day. After the biker hit me, he neither apologized nor stopped to see if I was okay. He just kept cruising down the street to make the light at the next block, never breaking his stride.

Okay, so he really only grazed me and I was fine. But two similar incidents later (including one this morning) led me to wonder who the cyclists think has the right of way in the street rights-of-way of Washington, DC.

Now, I get the idea of the alternative commute and I myself cycle great distances on the region’s excellent trail system. In New York, I have taken to the burgeoning bike network that encircles Manhattan and connects the Brooklyn shore to New York Harbor. But I am also a pedestrian for my commute and most of my daily trips.

As an urbanist, I have dutifully preached the evils of driving and supported cycling by pushing growth and development strategies that put butts into bicycle seats. But I also believe that walking ultimately rules the transportation kingdom. With DC and New York and other cities investing heavily in both policy and infrastructure that support cycling over driving, and with all the education about motorist safety around cyclists, it is time that someone explained to the cyclists the transportation pecking order. Autos last, but people on foot before bikes. Pedestrian safety is paramount in pedestrian-oriented places, and cyclists are required to follow the rules of the road. Cyclists as a group will get a lot more respect if they are seen as practicing what they preach from their two-wheeled perch.

The Greatness of Grit

DL — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 19:25:50 +0000

Grit is what’s left behind on the sidewalk when cultures converge. Its what’s left over the morning after the night before. Its that stinky fruit that falls from Ginkgo trees every year in the fall. Its the bustle and the hustle, the guy on the corner selling cheap hats from China and incense oils. Real city neighborhoods have grit, the sounds and smells and sights of cultures converging in daily life. Grit is what drives some people from city neighborhoods, but a big part of what makes city neighborhoods great places to live. My neighborhood has great grit.