Speed, Space, and Scale

When conditions are right I walk at about 4 miles per hour.  By “conditions” I mean all the usual pedestrian variables: what I’m carrying, what’s falling on me, what I’m walking on, and what my feet are in. I slow down when things aren’t ideal, when it’s icy and I’m carrying lunch, my computer, and a change of shoes, or if I didn’t want to carry that change of shoes and I’m just doing my usual 2+ miles daily commute in heels.  Sometimes I’m faster, when I’m late, cold, or in speedy flats.  But the variation is pretty minor; no matter whether it’s 3 or 4 miles per hour I would argue that I experience an entirely different place than a driver or even a cyclist.  The place that we see and feel at a walking pace is not at all the same place as seen through a windshield and mediated by shock absorbers.  Although this might make Einstein cringe, I think there is a general theory of relativity that describes the urban environment and it can be stated thus:  Speed + Space = Scale.

I touched on this in my previous post (a very long 5 months ago, mea culpa) but that was a rant on how ill-matched our precise measurings are to our sense of distance.  Tell someone to walk two and a half blocks and they can figure it out; tell someone to walk 800’ and they’ll just look at you. Or, more likely, they’ll ask their portable digital navigation assistant to figure it out for them.  But talking as if space is purely measurable, whether in blocks or feet, only addresses the speed/scale relationship; it says very little about scale.  

roses at a portal to another dimension

 Scale is material. Wandering the richly detailed streets of Old Town Alexandria one can completely lose all sense of time.  Often when I’m leaving the King Street Metro stop visitors will ask me “how far is it to the waterfront?”  I used to tell them the metric truth:  “it’s a little over a mile, maybe a mile and a quarter.”  Then I would watch them settle in to wait for the free trolley.  Now I just smile and tell them the experienced truth: “just take that street and keep walking. It’ll take you about 20 minutes; you can’t miss it.”  And off they go.  What they discover of course is the haptic vividness of a 3-4 mile per hour environment.  Every step and railing, doorway and flower pot, offers something to enjoy and the brick sidewalks guarantee thoughtful walking. Time stretches and bends; you walk slowly but you don’t notice how far you’ve gone. When they, our typical visitor, return home to 35-mile-per-hour-land they’ll think that what made this place different was the “history”, the narrative of founding fathers, rebellions, and preservation.  They probably won’t think of speed and its relationship to space. 

Outer Asphaltia has its own speed/space relationship.  I had always puzzled over the part of Einstein’s theory that states that an exceptionally massive object can distort the adjacent fabric of space-time.  Then I went to a Walmart.  Although I will gladly walk miles through the streets of Alexandria or Washington, put me behind the wheel of a rental car and I’ll clench the steering wheel while I search for the closest possible parking spot so I can enter the gates of hell for a load of cheap crap.  And would anyone voluntarily walk from a Walmart to a neighboring Home Despot? No, because you’d be walking through void and distorted space-time, with no sign of human care or intelligence against which you could measure your progress.

cobbles and asphalt:  how fast is this place?

 It’s a problematic word, progress.  It’s spatial and temporal, and also heavily value-laden.  It’s progress that we can move so much more quickly than we did a century ago.  It is progress that our information can move even faster, liberated from attachment to us.  But it’s a fact of progress that speed disrespects the slow.  The very elements that make a walkable place—incremental materials, generous sidewalks, short blocks, tight turning radii, street trees, on-street parking, narrow driving lanes, and stop signs—send drivers into fits.  At 35 miles per hour a world of beauty is flying by, not only unseen but unvalued.  We’ve spent far too much time in the last 60years designing fast environments.    Maybe instead of focusing so obsessively on the style of new buildings and neighborhoods we should focus more on their speed:  how fast is this place?

“Today we experience an ease of motion unknown to any prior urban civilization, and yet motion has become the most anxiety-laden of daily activities. The anxiety comes from the fact that we take unrestricted motion of the individual to be an absolute right.  The private motorcar is the logical instrument for exercising that right, and the effect on public space, especially the space of the urban street, is that the space becomes meaningless or even maddening unless it can be subordinated to free movement ... The technology of modern motion replaces being in the street with a desire to erase the constraints of geography.”

      Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man 

The Measure of Things

I saw a sign last week on a lovely two-lane back road in rural Virginia.  It said “school bus stop 800 feet.”  It was a warning, I assume:   Careful!  There’s a school bus stop in 800 feet!  My brother and I were traveling at 55miles per hour which meant, if my story-problem math is right, that we would be at that spot in less than 10 seconds. But no one does that sort of math in their head while driving--and it took me more than 10 seconds to do it here-- besides, despite the well-known relationship between space and time, that’s not really how we think of distance.   As we hurtled along I looked up the road which was rising and falling the way old pre-interstates do, and I wondered when we would reach that magic place 800 feet ahead.  I wanted to fix my eyes on that spot, but there were no blocks or familiar markers to help me.  That we saw that sign a few more times gave me the chance to keep gnawing on the question, perhaps a little too much. 

On a two-lane state road it is impossible to visualize 800 feet, particularly when one is in motion.  On a city street, however, it is easy to visualize 4 blocks. Where’s the school bus stop?  It’s about 2 ½ blocks.  In Old Town Alexandria, that would be about 800 feet: in the east-west direction Old Town’s blocks are about 290 feet, so 2 ½ times that is 725’.  With that level of specificity one could not only find the bus stop but have a pretty good sense of what the walk there would be like.  With a street address one could be more precise, but that level of information is sufficient for the situation.  Even though every city has its own dimension of block—Washington’s are significantly bigger and more diverse than Alexandria’s, while Portland, Oregon, is known for its diminutive 220’ blocks—the block itself is a familiar and meaningful unit of urban measure.  

Technology can measure things with great precision, greater precision than necessary in fact, resulting in a quality of inappropriate specificity that I call “misprecision.”  Misprecision is precision out of context, lengths and strengths with no reasonable reference to human experience.  A computer-modeled construction detail dimensioned to 1/64^th of an inch is misprecision, as are clocks that count 10ths of seconds and nutrition guidelines described in grams.  Misprecision also describes exhausted units of measure that have long ago lost their referents.  What possible meaning does “horsepower” have to anyone now? I can easily picture a team of horses pulling a chariot behind them, but in what way does such a quadriga (a rare opportunity to use that word!) help anyone understand how fast a motorboat might go?  800 horses under the hood of a sports car?  That metaphor is OBT, overtaken by technology.  

It’s not that measurement isn’t important, or that we shouldn’t embrace new tools and technologies for measuring.  Big Data brings all sorts of previously disaggregated information into precise sets that can be overlaid and correlated, letting us describe—measure—cities and neighborhoods in fascinating and no doubt misprecise ways.  The question, I suppose, for urbanists is how much do we need to know and in what form to make lovable cities?  How do we communicate those qualities to constituents?  Is it more helpful to say that within a 1000 foot radius one can find food, drink, and conversation or that I can find all that in 3 or 4 blocks in any direction? No one navigates the city on radii, and 1000 sounds like a lot.  But, 3 or 4 blocks?  Wow, that’s convenient!

Transparent Things

I admit it, I haven’t read it—an opening disclaimer I use far too often—but I’m intrigued by Neil MacGregors’s “objects” histories:  A History of the World in 100 Objects and Shakespeare’s Restless World: a Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects. As I am always desperately seeking structure for my own writing, particularly when I presume to write about such an unwieldy and self-invented topic as Urbiphilia, I’m wondering if one can offer a portrait of a city or a place in a certain number of objects.  I would have to set up some rules of course--define object, for example—but it might be worth a try.  

We do read places that way, through objects, and the accumulation over time of a mental map of these objects is what defines any given city for each of us. These aren’t general objects, but specific ones, rooted in this particular city at this particular time; they are not concepts or classes of things, but percepts.  An object of unremarkable ordinariness all of a sudden shines through in a secular hierophany, saturated with the qualities of this place.  That’s why we buy souvenirs, or snatch little bits of place to take home in our pockets. From these we construct our memory palaces.

I have a chunk of white stone, kicked loose from the beautiful mosaic pavement of the Rua Augusta in Lisbon.  It conjures memories: of three weeks in summer 2002 with a diverse and somewhat fractious group of students and faculty; of all the difficulties that encrusted that particular program; of the taste of vinho verde and olives; of heat and blinding sun, and my mental map of the city.  Because I’m an architect, I also attend to the stone itself, the material reality of that street.  It isn't only a device or instrument of memory, it is a thing itself.  There are streets and plazas all over the world made of such small pieces of stone. Each one was hewn, chosen, cradled, and placed by someone on his knees with the sun on his back. In many the fan shaped pattern still telegraphs the radius of reach of one individual, a beautiful result of the effort to save effort.  It doesn’t seem right to call these surfaces “pavements;” let’s save that word for viscous liquids spread by heavy equipment. These are floors. Wherever and whenever they were first laid, whether the Piazza San Marco, the Rua Augusta, the synapse between the East and West buildings of the National Gallery, the bricks of Old Town Alexandria, these floors tell a remarkably complex story of power, social hierarchy, value, and desire.  

Nabakov, in Transparent Things, warns us not to treat objects like this:  “When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention my lead us to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment.  Transparent things, through which the past shines!”  Well, Vlad, I’m not a novice; I’m a trained professional on closed track and the sinking is voluntary.  If one is in the business of designing the future, we depend on the transparency of things to understand what we value.

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.