The Geography of Bureaucracy

photo courtesy of Dave Shove-Brown

The playground at Lincoln Park is locked shut.  Barriers warn cyclists off the Capital Crescent Trail. The GW memorial trail, the Anacostia River walk, the C&O Canal path are all closed due to the government shutdown.  Monuments and memorials, designed to be literally and metaphorically open, are jury-rigged with bike racks to prevent us the people from experiencing the better angels of our history. (Why is it always bike racks?  What giant warehouse do the overlords haul them out of?  Can’t we use them for their intended purpose?) For us urbanists this is a rare—please, let it remain rare—exposure of the myriad invisible jurisdictional boundaries that shape the experiential landscape.  We get to see the true nature of the geography of bureaucracy. Oh joy.

Most discussions about the construction and livability of cities centers on the problematic of public and private space.  We weigh in on the differences among the Occupy encampments in POPS—privately owned public spaces-- versus true public space.  We worry about pseudo-public spaces such as shopping malls and privatized streets.  We look for and celebrate alternatives in “third places” and DIY urbanism.  We assert our right to the city. The bright line we thought we saw between public and private has prevented our seeing the lines within public space.  Now the prism of the federal lockout has refracted the monolithic public into a spectrum of different publics and it’s an unsettling sight.   There’s city public and there’s federal public.  Even city public cowers under the shadow of federal public; we citizens of the District of Columbia don’t even have voting voice in this lockout.  Connections are severed, paths blocked, daily rituals upended. Our powerlessness is exposed.

The very fabric of the city, uniquely woven from Cartesian grid and cross-cutting diagonals knotted at green circles and squares, tells its story of bureaucratic layers.  In the abstract, places like Lincoln Park and Dupont Circle are nodes, intermittent points where the two street systems of the city join. In reality, each is a neighborhood center and beloved public place. They appear to be city parks, but they're not.  Few of the city's defining green spaces actually belong to the city and its citizens.  We just get to use them when the Park Service says we can. De jure, they are federal spaces; de facto, they are city places.  

The change in words is intentional:  space is abstract, but place is real. Our public landscapes are inextricably woven together, not only at the custodial level of whose trash cans are next to whose benches, or the managerial level of what behavior is and is not allowed, but truly at the quotidian level of our everyday lives. Like the inhabitants of one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, our buildings and places are strung together with different strings according to the character of our relationships:  one string connects a family to its playground, the parents to the workplace, the child to her friend’s house, and so on.  We only notice that web when some of the strings get cut.

Ideology is the apprehension of reality at a distance. (I’m not sure who said that; it may have been the Italian architecture theorist Manfredo Tafuri. I should track it down, but scholarship is the first casualty of blogging.) That distance makes decision-making so much easier, because one can’t really see the fine-grained consequences. The ideologues can pat themselves on the back for passing their own self-defined purity tests; meanwhile reality itself is remarkably indifferent. Architects and planners have learned over the years that attempts to design and implement ideal cities inevitably fail because reality will always win.  Remember that the word “utopia” really means “no place.”  All building, all place-making is political in that it has to involve compromise.  I tell my students that all space is political; now I see that all politics is spatial.

Happy PARK(ing) Day!

Happy PARK(ing) Day everyone!  Go out and claw a piece of public space out of the steel clenches of an automobile!

Landscape students from the WAAC setting up their space

From my window at the WAAC I can see a few of  our intrepid landscape students setting up their “PARK-opoly” game in two parking spaces on South St. Asaph Street.  They’ve already weathered some predictable snide asides from the NFA—the No Fun Allowed—types.  “Children can’t play in the street!” “You know, parking is really valuable here.”  Oh boy. 

The Washington Post Magazine just ran a series of articles last Sunday looking at the future of Washington (which is looking so bright, I’m already wearing my shades) and one of them focused on the care and board of these ubiquitous metal beasts.  Harriet Tregoning, the city’s world-class planner, said “Five to 10 years ago, if some aliens had taken a picture from space they would think our city was inhabited by steel creatures with gushy insides. Creatures that slept most of the time.”

PARK(ing) Day is a clever way to open our eyes to all the other things we could do with the roughly 200 square feet that we’ve just handed over to these beasts and their servants.  Danish urbanist Jan Gehl tells a great story of how Copenhagen gradually wrestled its streets from automobile hegemony by subversively taking away a few spaces every night.  Alexandria and the District have already bulbed out sidewalks at intersections; the District has usurped some parking spaces for Capital Bikeshare docks.  The possible next steps are being constructed all over the world today, and there are probably a few right near where you work.

Henri Lefebvre wrote in the late 1960’s about the “right to the city,” the right of all people, not only those with capital or power, to be present and visible in the city.  His is a forecful, if difficult to read, argument for fighting for the public in public space.  His theories underlined the recent Occupy movement, with their resistance to the excessive power of global capital to shape our cities.  But we’ve sat passively by, in the passenger seat so to speak, for decades and put the convenience of car and driver above all else in urban planning and policy.  Our cities long ago lost the fine grain that comes from the height and pace of a walking person.  No more is the human as measure of all things; now it's the SUV. But, as Tregoning makes beautifully clear, there’s absolutely no reason why it should always be so.

So, if you walk by a new little café, garden, or play space, stop and enjoy it. See how good it feels to occupy that space.  You have a right to it.

1001+601 =?

1001 + 601 = 1602? No, it equals one, the new full WAAC. After having  spent the last 20-something years in one little Baltic birch gridded room after another in 1001 Prince I have moved to a new office on the south side of the second floor of 601 Prince.  It’s a big move for me, and a bigger one for the WAAC.

 It’s arguably the biggest leap in growth and complexity the WAAC has taken since 1991 when my hiring as a lowly Assistant Professor coincided with the purchase of 1001. That year we moved out of our upstairs digs at 101 N. Columbus at the corner of King Street, where the retail below us had changed over the years from People’s Drugs to CVS and finally to Bertucci’s.  From one perspective, we just added a zero to our address; from another, we multiplied our complexity with a graduate program and more consortium students.  For those of us who had been students in the upstairs space, with its windows over the bustling main street of Alexandria, it felt a little like moving to the suburbs, to the residential precinct of Prince Street far, far, away from the hustle and bustle of town.  One block makes such a difference! 

Now we’ve added a substantial building to the campus, a 19^th century former church, that had been renovated and occupied by the venerable landscape firm EDAW until the firm was devoured by the insatiable AECOM.  Abandoned by EDAW and coveted by the WAAC, the quirky building sat empty for a few years until the VT Foundation finally bought it.  So here we go, once more into the great unknown of how place, distance, architecture, and the city influence our habits, institutions, and behaviors.  We, as design faculty and professional architects, are quick to defend architecture’s significance in life—it matters, we insist.  It changes lives.  Funny, it gets a little unsettling when it’s your life getting changed.  And frankly, as professionals we’re never sure exactly how architecture changes lives or in exactly what way it matters.  We’re about to find out.

I’ve been using the metaphor of mitosis to frame this transformation: the WAAC had to divide and increase in complexity rather than just grow as a big single-cell organism.  But I think it’s more of a “Marcel Breuer meets Leon Battista Alberti” story.  That’s more architectural anyway.  Breuer designed a series of what he called “binuclear” houses in his long and wonderful career.  This was a truly original residential type:  he would split the program into two equal yet different wings and connect them with an entry/breezeway. Sometimes the split was between adults and children, sometimes between public and private, but it could work just as well for loud and quiet, dark and light, and so on.  Like any fertile parti, the binuclear type is open to interpretation as long as the fundamental elements are strong.

The WAAC is developing a binuclear campus and the breezeway is 4 blocks of Prince Street. The connection/division is the city itself, 4 blocks that WAAC feet will engrave over the years even as the absent-minded users of the city stroll and cross unaware.  Our paths around 1001 have become ruts.  Our worlds can become very small if we let them, and My Old Town had effectively shrunk to the few blocks around 1001 that provide coffee  and several different lunch typologies--quick, slow, and very slow—with an occasional stretch to the post office.  It’s easy to forget that I work in one of the most beautiful embodiments of the best in American urbanism.  Now I get to enroll 4 blocks of Prince Street into my WAAC world and rediscover the changing color of different trees, new puddles, sounds and smells. 

The city, Alberti tells us, is a big house and the house a small city.  Our new WAAC campus is a big binuclear house and the binuclear house is a small city.  Breuer designed the two wings of the house to serve the functions desired, and tuned the connection between them.  We, on the other hand, found our nuclei, and joined them through ownership, thus summoning the connection into existence.  We’re hermit crabs, resourcefully crawling into shells abandoned by others and then enjoying the task of constructing a home for ourselves.  It’s taken over 20 years of creative destruction and construction to get 1001 to its current state of exquisite incompletion.  601 has quite a few decades of work in its future, despite—or because of-- the work being done right now by the professional contractor hired by the VT Foundation. There’s something oddly reassuring about that--to me at least, can’t speak for anyone else—because it means that there is still room for reflection and change, for students next year, and the year after that, to participate in the constant construction of the WAAC.  The WAAC that each of us entered is never exactly the WAAC that we leave.  It’s always changing, but stays itself.

St Francis of Hyde Park

Here's another London vignette...

I saw St. Francis in Hyde Park; he was slope-shouldered and solid, just like Giotto painted him.  Wearing a blue suit instead of brown robe, he stands just off the path with one hand outstretched.  A squirrel beseeches at his feet, hands and face upturned.  St. Francis pulls seeds from an orange plastic Sainsbury bag, holds out his palm and waits...A tiny bird falls like a leaf to his hand to feed and flits back up into the camouflage of foliage.  Another comes, and another, always taking turns. He leans down to the patient squirrel, answering its prayers. Young men with soccer balls, mothers with carriages, oblivious young with eyes only for their phones, and giggling teens--they all pass by him.  A child stops and turns to watch; only she can see him.  Her mother tugs her hand without glancing back and off they go.  It’s a warm Friday evening in Hyde Park.  Springsteen's lyrics ring in my ears:  it’s so hard to be a saint in the city.  But St Francis seems fine.

The 25 Bus to Ilford

One of the most wonderful things about public transportation, perhaps second only to not having to waste your eyes and attention on driving, is eavesdropping on others.  I rarely stuff my ears with buds when I’m out in the city, because I like to hear it.  I like to hear them: the countless individuals immersed in their own private lives while passing through our shared air.  A few years ago I was on Metro on my way home from Spanish class and I had the thrill of actually comprehending a conversation between two Spanish-speakers.  I was so excited I almost tipped them off that I was listening, but that didn’t seem fair. At least they weren’t talking about me. In London, where I just spent almost a month, language isn’t a barrier—well, not much of one—and eavesdropping is easy and entertaining.  So I did a lot of listening from my favorite seat in the front window on the top floor of the double-decker bus. 

Here’s one of my favorites from the 25 bus to Ilford, transcribed as accurately as possible.  The two were both from elsewhere.  She was Polish; he was Colombian.  Their conversation touched on the timely problematic of migration and globalism, and also the eternal questions of belonging:  what is it to be “English”? To be Polish? Is it something given or acquired? And, what about the hydrogen...

She:       What makes someone English? 

He:         Your behavior has changed since you came to England.
She:       Who stays the same? I’ve been here for 6 years; I’m not 15 anymore.  Am I Polish still?
He:         When someone asks you where you’re from it’s not the same as who you are.
She:       If I tell you I love Colombia it doesn’t make me Spanish.
He          (pause) So, the hydrogen.  Where did it all come from?  If all the elements were formed from hydrogen, then where did the hydrogen come from?
She:       (looking out the window as we roll down Whitechapel) That’s my dentist. He fucked up my bridge.
He:         Where did it come from? You know what I think?  The existence of hydrogen is proof of god.

The bus passed the East London Mosque stop, and then the next one was mine.  I thought about staying on a bit longer just to hear where the conversation might go.