Transit Reverie

A disabled train at Takoma Park.  A thickening crowd of people fill the platform at Gallery Place where I had just stepped off the Yellow Line for my usual change to Red.  They were a chatty group, attention split between glowing screens and sharing information with their fellow strandees—“My friend’s at Union Station and he’s been waiting for 15 minutes and hasn’t seen a train yet.” A muffled, muddled voice comes over the PA and we all stop, heads tilted as if tipping one ear upward will better clarify the sound.  “What did he say?”  “I have no idea.”  It’s time to consider my options.

I have many options...

I realize that I know more about the bus routes of London than I do my own city of Washington, but fortunately the little device in my pocket is my guide, my Beatrice, from the underworld.  The 42, it turns out, begins its route to Mount Pleasant right above my head at 9^th and G, so with a nod to those around me—“I’m outta here”—I make my way to the surface.

A young guy is smoking a joint in the bus shelter while his friend talks incessantly at him about Ferguson; a third sits slumped on the anti-sitting bench.  They have laid claim to the shelter, so the rest of us workers, homeless, and tourists, bump umbrellas in the cold rain.  The German couple grows impatient and hails a taxi, rolling away in Prius quiet.  I could do that too, I think to myself. Or I could Uber.  Or find a Car2Go.  Bike share is out, but I have so many options, far more than many of those around me.  But I stay and wait. Uber will be pricey, reflecting the micro-dynamics of bad weather, Metro delays, and rush hour; the taxi may or may not take a credit card and I’m cash light; and I’d rather walk home than actually get in a Smart car and drive myself.  So I wait.

such as the 42

The 42 comes right on time, reasonably close to the 2 minutes that NextBus promises.  The homeless woman with the cart is holding up the line, and declining the gentle help of the young blonde.  Sitting by the window in the warm dry bus I watch the wet city roll past me—Zara, Blackfinn, Pret a Manger.  The 42 cuts through the parts of the city that I know best which makes this trip that particularly wonderful combination of familiarity and discovery.  An H&M in the old Filene’s spot? Who knew?  Lucky Bar, still sticky no doubt.  For a moment I feel like I could be in London, watching the yellow glow of restaurants and bars, the neon lights of fast food, the cool LED glow of office lobbies.

I slip into the kind of reverie unique to transit: freed from the task of attending to where I’m going and all the obstacles and perils both major and minor that punctuate my path, I can listen to the buzz of other conversations and watch the spectacle of the city unspool, glistening in the Blade Runner rain.

Although this trip had taken about 15 minutes longer than my usual Red Line + walk, it offers a textured way to experience the city as a living continuum rather than a series of discrete and predictable points.   I should get out at Gallery Place and take the bus more often.

Metaphiers and Metaphrands

A city is a large house and a house, a small city, says the ever quotable Leon Battista Alberti, whom I have quoted before here. Like all the pithy architecture quotes about form and function and less and more and the ontological aspirations of bricks, this one lands with an authoritative yet unenlightening thud because we never get to the follow up: in what ways are city and house alike? are they alike in any meaningful way?  And, where does such a comparison get us?

 

I’ve always preferred to think of it as a sociological/administrative metaphor rather than a spatial one. In that way, it opens a way of thinking about the complexities of running a city--the shared yet distinct interests of different populations; the judicious stewardship of resources; the need for a clear decision-making hierarchy.  Although there certainly is mapping of functions and there are metaphorical urban living rooms, it’s not really the form or structure of house and city that are similar, so much as the city as a collective body and the house as household.  

For a metaphor to serve its intended didactic purpose the listener has to have sufficient familiarity with one of the terms to cast the bright light of understanding on the other term and generate the big epiphany we all crave. The city, you see, is quite like a house; and of course, you know about the house.  Take what you know about the house and contemplate the city.  Now, see how that understanding of the city bounces new light on your prior understanding of the house?  What makes a metaphor powerful, though, is when the comparison strains familiarity, when the metaphier and the metaphrand produce a new way of understanding.   

Put a group of architecture students in a room and run that metaphor by them and it oddly may not work so well.  What they know best--and what we all knew at that age--isn't house and city really, it's the campus, that magical mystery mesocosm between house and city, and between the intimate protections of childhood and the big city. The very knowledge of house, of household, that they need to pry open the metaphor is pretty thin: they are a few years removed from the houses of their youths, which were administered and stewarded by others. They—and this is a generalization of course—manage only their own resources; their control over their social space is transient and contingent.  They borrow, share, rent, move. Liberated by technology from the tether of the land-line, their personal area codes indicate only where they lived when they reached communications maturity, not where they are.  

temporary political place-making in Oaxaca, MX,  photo by Douglas Palladino

The monolithic words “city” and “house” aren’t sufficiently exercised to be sufficient anymore. It can’t compete with Alberti in succinctness, but for the Millennials an  urban campus is a great shared apartment; a shared apartment, a miniature urban campus, where "campus" rings closer to its original meaning of a field, a temporary making of place surrounded by something else.  And,  maybe the terms "house" and "city" have become stale to us all.  There is a line of thinking in urban theory that says the contemporary city is unknowable; that the beloved formal clarity and legibility of the traditional city persists only in precincts for nostalgic consumption.  Perhaps the house is equally unknowable, in which case the metaphor holds, just not in the way it is usually deployed.

The Hunch

It starts with the solitary intimations of a problem, of bits and pieces here and there which seem to offer clues to something hidden.  They look like fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole.  This tentative vision must turn into a personal obsession; for a problem that does not worry us is no problem: there is no drive in it, it does not exist.    

Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension

A problem that does not worry us is no problem.  No problem!  Isn’t that the point?  To have no problems?  Hey man, no problem.  No worries.  I don’t have a problem with that.  You got a problem with it? 

Like “criticism,” the word “problem” has a very different meaning in creative or scientific inquiry than it does in casual conversation.  It’s the nature of scientific problems that epistemologist Polanyi is talking about in the quote above, but it applies equally well to design, particularly in design research, that mysterious territory of abduction, selective historiography, and innovation.

I shared this quote with my Comparative Urbanism class to shore up my own theories of problem-setting and solving because the syllabus emphasizes “independent research” on a topic of the student’s own choosing.  The word “research” looms opaque and intimidating over design students.  Am I supposed to be a scholar?  Am I supposed to be proving something?  Disproving something?  How is it all supposed to help me design, when I close the LOC or Avery website and start sketching? How do I choose a topic? A thesis question?  (If you really want to torment a graduate student, be sure to ask, every chance you get, no matter the subject of the conversation, “but what’s your thesis question?”)

It begins with The Hunch, my shorthand for what Polanyi more eloquently explains in his little but dense book The Tacit Dimension.  The Hunch comes from perception, experience, and exposure.  It is personal, but if we are dedicated to contributing to our chosen fields, it can’t stay that way.  So, as we reflect on where The Hunch came from, we have to figure out a way to interrogate it.  Historical research? Primary sources? First hand observation? Interviews? Design research is catholic, small c intended; it opens its eclectic arms to embrace bits of the scientific method, investigative journalism, historiography, and detective work, not to mention leaps of creativity. It’s easy to be transgressive in design research, to spill over accepted boundaries and make inappropriate noises.  Oddly, that’s its strength because its goals, its ends, are quite different from these other forms of research.  What’s important, though, is for the designer to determine exactly what standard of scholarship is necessary for action.  And then be completely faithful.

I have a hunch. I’ve had it for a while but haven’t yet done the research necessary to own it.  It is personal, constructed on my time spent in Williamsburg and Washington, but its significance isn’t limited to me.  It is a good problem, and it obsesses me with a constant background buzz, begging for attention.  It’s this:  That the late 17^th century plans for the two royal capitals of the Virginia and Maryland colonies, Williamsburg and Annapolis-- both designed in the 1690s by Sir Francis Nicholson—influenced L’Enfant’s plan for Washington a hundred years later. There’s a lot of correlative evidence for this with various asides and casual mentions by John Reps, Larry Vale, and others of similarities among these cities, but I’ve yet to see anything that documents an actual influence.  And, I have my own slightly conspiratorial theories about that.  What would I need, aside from simply elevating this hunch to the top of my research to do list, to write the definitive urban proof?  Some correspondence between the father of our country and his architect, maybe something like this…

Dear Peter,

I’m glad to hear you’ll be tackling the Capital City project!  Your letter was quite persuasive.  You’re so right that no nation has ever had such an opportunity…no pressure, though.  BTW, Tom will come around, I’m sure, but you know how he is. He’s a smart guy—won’t let anyone forget that he went to William and Mary—but on this project he’s just not thinking big enough. 

The whole French connection will be a big selling point, even though things are looking a little rocky over there right now. Still I see your point that just a nice plan of rond-points and diagonal avenues overlaid on a Cartesian grid isn’t enough to make decisions about where to locate important buildings.  So by all means, make use of that Nicholson fellow’s work in Maryland and Virginia, but let’s keep that to ourselves.  Mentioning an English precedent?  Too soon, Peter. Too soon.

Cheers,

GW

Comparing Cities

Washington and Berlin. Minneapolis and St Paul. Chicago and New York. Paris and Buenos Aires. There are some cities that seem to come in pairs, whether as twins, rivals, siblings, or off-spring.  They reflect, mimic, and answer, each other in form, culture, and power.  We’re always comparing cities; we almost do it for sport (and it’s often about sports).  We note the ways in which one city is superior to another because of what it does or doesn’t have.  

We Washingtonians regularly get smacked down for the failings and quirks of our city.  Washington isn’t a real city because_____.  Fill in the blank with your own gripe.  It doesn’t have real neighborhoods, so say the Baltimoreans, despite empirical evidence of humans happily place-attaching themselves to Benning Heights, Bloomingdale, and Brookland.  In fact, Washington has some of the most memorable and imageable neighborhoods, thanks to L’Enfant’s plan which bestows on various chunks of the city unique combinations of geometries--circles, squares, orthogonals and hypotenuses—and geographies—ridges, hills, and shores—not to mention finely tuned views to our incomparable monuments. 

Which, of course, leads others to the common complaint: Washington isn’t a real city because it doesn’t have a skyline. At least that’s what the pre-Copernican Manhattanites say, who still think the world revolves around their little island the skyline of which telegraphs the message that concentrated private capital defines the city.  Washington does have a skyline, but its buildings belong to all of us. The wish for a skyline comes only from capitalists, formalists, and purveyors of postcards. While a skyline is as necessary to a city as bicycle ownership is to a fish, that’s not to say that density isn’t crucial to a city.  In fact, urbanity depends on the friction of constant human encounters, and its economic health depends on enough people with enough discretionary income to support enough street life.  It’s the bottom twenty feet of buildings, not the top, that make or break a city.

  

As much as we’d like to say that every city, like every child, has its own special challenges and merits, and we shouldn’t compare them, comparisons are powerful tools for sparking change.  Portland’s success with light rail and streetcars is only reproducible if planners, designers, and elected officials can parse the ways in which their own situation is or is not similar to Portland’s.  Washington builds a sports arena in the middle of its formerly moribund downtown and chooses not to provide any parking for its 20,000+ fans.  What does another city need to know about Washington to predict whether that will work for them?  What is it about Charlottesville that made its pedestrianized downtown thrive, while others have languished?

These are some of the questions that we’ll be raising, and maybe even answering, this spring in the brand new, fresh from the curriculum committee, Comparative Urbanism Seminar.  It’s always a little scary to teach a brand new course, and it’s been awhile for me, but I do believe that this is going to be fun! And I’ll be sharing with urbiphiles everywhere.

Step by Step

It’s 10AM and according to my helpful smartphone app I’ve already walked 4367 steps. The app also tells me that 4367 steps equals 2.08 miles. This app comes, unrequested and free, with the new operating system of my iPhone and lets me obsess over all sorts of personal health issues that my steam-punk Razr couldn’t imagine…if a phone can imagine at all.  I’ve written before here about the gap between metrics and perception of things like distance, so I’m happy that my phone is smart enough to convert my steps into miles.  Who really measures distance in steps?  Would you ever give directions in steps? "Just go about 1500 steps, turn right and after 3412 steps you'll be there."   

I had a hunch, based on graphic distances on actual maps, that I typically walked about 2+ miles per day just getting to and from school.  My phone gives me more nuanced and provocative data…and some real surprises.  On Monday I walked over 12,000 steps; yesterday only in the upper 9000s.  Both were WAAC days, meaning that I had the same commute. Why the difference?  Well, Monday is a studio day and Tuesday is a seminar day, and that means that on Monday I walked up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, and even back and forth between 601 and 1001 Prince a few times. Tuesday I was mostly stationary lecturing, although I made a few 601/1001 trips.  This got me thinking, of course, about technology, efficiency, pedagogy, public health and urban design. 

At the WAAC we organize studio completely differently from other schools: studio is an identity rather than a geographic location. My students—and they’re not really mine at all as we always team teach—do not all sit in one room side by side; they occupy desks on every floor of both of our buildings.  To give a desk crit to any one of them I have to walk to find them.  There are many practical and pedagogical reasons for that: it disrupts the hegemony of program, dissolves the autocracy of the studio critic, and it guarantees mixing with other design disciplines and levels.  There are downsides which are in fact simply the dark side of each of the above reasons, but I hadn’t really thought that one of the benefits was fitness.  Turns out we’ve inadvertently provided an active design workplace.  One could argue, and more than one has argued, it certainly isn’t the most efficient way to organize students. That’s only true, however, from an industrial era definition of efficiency.  We don’t subscribe to Taylorist principles within design studio, so why would we want it to be organized like a Frankfurt kitchen, where the studio critic can move from student to student with maximum efficiency and minimum exertion? 

Technology and efficiency are tightly intertwined.  As Carl Mitcham says, all technological innovations arise from efforts to save effort.  Interpreted narrowly and applied uncritically to more complex systems—such as educational institutions and cities—the pursuit of technological efficiency can have strangely inefficient consequences.  It may seem like I have a comically inefficient workday, adding 2-3 extra miles of walking just to do my job, it is just a different kind of efficiency.  If I drove to work, which would be faster—such a 20^th century definition of efficiency—and could see all my students in one room Frankfurt kitchen-style, then I’d have to set aside some chunk of time to get 5 miles of walking or running into my day. How inefficient is that?

In the Intelligent Cities project we explored the complex and sometimes invisible way that new information and communication technologies, like smartphones, are changing our cities.  Even as I carry around with me the most sophisticated efforts to save effort—hey, Siri—it does seem that we are in the process of redefining efficiency in the same way that chaos theory redefined order.  Inefficiencies can be remarkably efficient if seen from the correct perspective.