The City Sounds...

The city sounds different these days. I live on a relatively quiet block of a narrow street connecting busy Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. As I write this morning, I hear rain falling, birds chirping, a car engine belching. Sometimes I hear the beep beep beep of a truck backing up, the slamming of the back of a delivery truck, dogs barking, snippets of conversation, helicopters. Some are natural others machine sounds, the mix tape of the random noises of urban life. But it's definitely quieter than Before. Silence in the city can be a precious commodity—and it is a commodity commanding a high price—but a silent city is also unnerving. Like Rachel Carson’s warning about a pesticide-induced “silent spring,” silent streets and sidewalks are an ominous sign. 

Over the last year a string of restaurants on Connecticut Avenue just north of Dupont Circle had begun to host regular live music. The old Childe Harold—I know it has another name, but it will always be Childe Harold to me—had gotten back to its live music roots; several newer places had begun to feature a single guitar player or small combo, often set up in the front window. Music leaked out onto the sidewalk, mixing with the noise of cars and horns and conversations. This was my evening soundtrack as I walked home from Metro in the Before Times. Now, just silence.

Music and noise. What’s the difference? It’s an insult to call music “noise” as in “hey you kids, turn that awful noise down.” Duke Ellington said that there are only two kinds of music, “good music and the other kind.” We may think that the difference between music and noise is purely subjective—the “other kind” is stuff I don’t like—but noise is also culturally constructed. “’Noise’ was a product of acoustics and psychology” says Shannon Mattern in “Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart,” in Places. In yet another of her wonderful pieces, Mattern is writing about sound, technologies of listening, and about efforts in the 1920s and 30s to analyze and quantify urban sounds. She talks about “scoring the city”--how to listen to the city, the role of the human ear, and what tools we need to perform acts of auscultation—mediated listening. Mattern compares this to how physicians learned to listen to the body—what distress is communicated in the heartbeat, what strength revealed in the deep breath? How should a heart sound, or a joint? What does a healthy body sounds like?

Zach Moshier,Urban Rhythms of Washington DC, Masters thesis, 2016

What does a healthy street sound like? And what is its antiphonal call and response—what is it saying, and what do we hear? The medical analogy does apply but since I’m not a doctor (nor do I play one on TV) I prefer to think of another type of listening—not to the noise of a body, but to music. When Mattern used the phrase “scoring the city,” I thought of the thesis of a former student, who was also a drummer in the WAAC Band. Zach really did score the city: he looked at historical maps to see—and hear—how the beat of V Street had changed over the years. It was a revelation: sound, not only sight, can be an instrument of urban analysis and design.

“Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city,” Petula Clark sang in her urban love song, Downtown. I’ve been writing my own ode to the city during this Covid-hibernation. Called “The City is Waiting” it's a melancholy reflection on the situation that seemed more suited to music than  prose. The refrain is about how the city is listening, waiting, restless, for us to return. When I looked up the lyrics to Downtown to make sure I got Petula’s words right I was struck by the last line of the chorus:  “No finer place, for sure. Downtown. Everything’s waiting for you.”

Place Matters

Place matters. Where we teach and where we learn, I have argued to anyone who would listen and to many who wouldn’t, is entangled in what and how we teach and learn. I have no real quantitative data to support the assertion, though, and I’m not sure how one would devise a method to determine the veracity of my claim. 

 “I could tell you,” says Italo Calvino, in his description of the city of Zaira in Invisible Cities, “how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs: but I already know that this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past…”

Some things simply elude quantitative measure; there are distances that step counters can’t count nor mile markers mark. How long does it take to climb the spiral stair in the WAAC library? 22 years and 10 seconds. Distance and measure are more elastic than our instruments can register. Time drags and flies—we accept that. But space is a partner in time, and so it too shrinks and stretches. Not all ½-mile walks are created equal. A walk on a narrow sidewalk, barren of trees, pressed against a blank wall or parking lot, stretches into tedium; while a walk down a broad, tree lined, generously windowed and doored sidewalk is almost too short to enjoy properly. Our responsibility as designers is, in a way, to give meaning to measure, to provide touchstones—stones to touch. 

Workdays—mine at least—were measured in these qualitative and highly situational distances. Would I stroll around the corner to my colleagues’ offices to share this? How long a walk is that? Would I walk down the hall to listen to this? How long a walk is that? Across campus? Is this the kind of thing we would discuss over coffee, thus requiring a walk across the street? And, what is the difference between an hour-long meeting and an hour-long meeting over coffee? Meeting for coffee is something more and other than simply meeting; not every meeting is worth the walk, short as it is.

Now we schedule virtual coffees, lunches, and happy hours--we humans are nothing if not adaptable. These meetings occur, but they don’t take place. One tangible consequence of this is that I am having a hard time remembering the difference between one meeting and another, because everything happens here, in the same place. The city outside functions like a memory palace, letting us tag--to use the social media term--places with events. Each of us has a unique lived world, constructed of the places we have lived, the paths we walk, the trains or buses we take, the coffee shop we visit, the lunch place with daily special. It keeps our memories in place. 

Calvino, again: “The city, however, does not tell is past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the street, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

Place matters because place measures. And remembers.

Prepositions, before and after

I’ve been thinking about prepositions. You know, those little words that shouldn’t terminate sentences but do. They come in pairs—in/out, above/below, on/under, before/after—and they seem fond of clarity. You’re either with us or against us. There was before and now there’s after; there’s nothing in between. 

Stay in. Don’t go out. Work on the computer. These little words tell us so much about ourselves and where we are, physically and metaphorically. It’s in their very name—to pre-position, to place before. Prepositions fix our place in time and space, and therefore our relations to others. For such small words, and ones we use so reflexively, they carry a heavy burden of conveying conditions of belonging or alienation, otherness or inclusion, at-homeness or displacement.

I live in the city. I work in a different city, but whether I am at home or at work, I am in the city. To move from one city to the other, I would go out, into the public realm of sidewalks and transit. That was before. Now, like everyone, I’m inside, #staying at home, in this city. I have never felt more aware of in. I am in my home, but at work, online. On line. On-line. Online. In the New Jersey vernacular of my youth, “on line” meant the condition of waiting in a linear arrangement with other people, a condition others might call being in line, or in a queue. Now it means something else, with no connection anymore to being somewhere, on a line connecting two points. Now we are networked. You can be on a line, but you are in a network.

Quality of life in the city, which is dense by definition, depends on clear thresholds between the pockets of public and private places that define urbanity. They are so clear they have names: gate, stoop, porch, vestibule, lobby, bay window…But that suite of relationships collapses online. The thresholds have vanished. We sit in our private spaces, looking through a glowing rectangle at the private spaces of others, at rooms we would never be invited into, hearing sounds from off-stage—barking dogs, clanking dishes—we shouldn’t hear. Private and public spaces—our private and public selves—are inside out while still inside, like a Klein bottle. 

I shouldn’t be in my students’ rooms and they shouldn’t be in mine. That’s why we have schools, libraries, museums, cafes, theaters, clubs, markets, plazas, playing fields, street corners: so I can meet you in a place that belongs to neither of us; so we can make room for strangers; so we can meet in a place big enough to hold a lot of us; so we can determine

what comes in and what stays out. The magic of the city is its capacity to offer all those places, and everything in between. Lewis Mumford described the city as both a magnet and a container: it attracts us with promises, so many promises, and then holds us--because it just keeps promising and we can’t quit it.

One of my thesis students said yesterday that this virus is the “enemy of urban design.” She wants to design a community place, for the human network, one like Italo Calvino’s city of Ersilia, entangled in strings of different colors to signify “a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency.” Calvino says that these strings represent the “relationships that sustain the city’s life,” and the citizens of Ersilia are constantly abandoning and rebuilding them. One of the intriguing aspects of this strange new world is that we are finding new ways to connect those strings, because we deeply need them. So when it’s time to leave the in, and venture out into the city again, we can put those strings back in place, more substantial and with better knots.