On the edge (of cities): past and present
We’ve been MIA on Suddenly the set of exhibitions, lectures and events exploring the shape of our cities through the lens, primarily, of German urban designer/theorist/architect Thomas Sieverts. But we did make it to Sieverts’ lecture and a panel discussion Friday afternoon at the UO’s new architecture school branch in the White Stag building in Portland’s Old Town, a suitably central (or maybe, paradoxically central) spot to consider the remaking of suburbs, I suppose.
Matthew Stadler (a Scatter friend) did the introductions and moderated the panel, which was appropriate, because it was his reading of Sieverts’ book Cities Without Cities that suddenly changed his thinking about where the energy in cities really is these days and started this “movement” going. I think I’m getting ready to argue that Matthew’s was a creative misreading of Sieverts, though I’m waiting for one more event, another panel on Monday night, to confirm my first impressions, especially since I haven’t read the book(!).
Fairly early on in Sieverts’ lecture another friend of Scatter wondered about the intelligibility of his argument. But I think I understood the gist. The thought line he presented went something like this. 1) European cities are “splash” cities, meaning they no longer have compressed central cores. Instead, they sprawl a lot like American cities. In Sieverts’ powerpoint, charts and graphs showed just how “splashy” specific German cities had become. 2) The edges of this sprawl are chaotic and featureless. 3) German cities are shrinking in population, which makes it hard to change the edges through growth: It takes transformation. 4) Architects should address the problems of the edge, supplying aesthetic “meaning” and cultural coherence to them, even though planners tend to ignore them because they are so nondescript. 5) If these “edge cities” are going to compete in the global economy, they are going to have to attract “creatives” (Richard Florida’s young creatives, though Florida wasn’t mentioned), and that makes the transformation of these featureless suburbs, between spaces, crucial.
Sieverts, who was born in 1934 and has had an important career in architecture and planning, then showed some of his recent projects that attempted to bring “meaning” to the edges. In Luxembourg he emphasized a public campaign to help people see the edges as something other than ugly so they could appreciate possible changes. A Rhine River project to help alleviate flooding (since the 19th century, the Rhine has been channeled and the surrounding landscape drained for farming, with some catastrophic consequences) also depended on changing the thinking of the people around the project. Some more: Sieverts connected a standard issue Ikea site off an autobahn to a surrounding system of parks by making making its parking lot a public area and constructing pedestrian paths. And most beautifully and dramatically, Sieverts converted a massive steel plant into a park with bridges, water features and protection from the accumulation of pollutants (photos above and below). So yes, transformation by changing the “cultural meaning” of places on the edge.
What were the takeaways? Most dramatically, that in Germany concern for the compact city center should be replaced by concern for the suburbs (neither Sieverts nor Stadler, if I remember correctly, used the word “suburb”), and that concern should be expressed in changing culture as much or more than changing the cityscape. The first part of this runs counter to our thinking about American cities, and especially Portland, where planners attempt to keep downtowns intact and often despair about their failure. What happens when you give up on central density and concentrate on “fixing” the featurelessness of the sprawl? Something like what Sieverts is trying to do, which he considers to be the rational response to conditions on the ground.
Or at least conditions on the ground in Germany. Because some American cities are growing, Portland among them. If our current population growth estimates are correct, we’ll be in a mash-up with something like another 1 million humans, at least, in the Portland metro area in the next 30 or 40 years. The conditions that generated sprawl in Germany have dissipated; they haven’t here. So perhaps our mantra of “density, density, density” still applies, and our efforts to make that density work should remain the central concern of planners. In Portland, efforts to direct growth outside the city core have already begun (with mixed results) and that growth, one way or another, will transform Lake Oswego, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Vancouver, Wash., and the rest of Portland suburbs. The struggle for planners is to get ahead of it.
So, I think Sieverts’ prescription for Germany isn’t directly applicable here. But I am persuaded by his argument that making “cultural meaning” on the edges is important, and that architects, as opposed to planners, are in position to supply it. Does that “meaning” have to include a New Urbanist yearning for a compact central core in each of our suburbs? Maybe not. But by this time, we’ve wandered away from Sieverts’ lecture and the panel that followed it.
Sieverts was on the panel, too, and he seemed genuinely surprised and interested in what the other panelists had to say and ultimately in the topic that Stadler had directed they consider — the possibility that the “urban” experience of pre-contact tribes in the Northwest might have some bearing on the way we consider our cities today. The other panelists were Coll Thrush (author of Native Seattle) Melissa Darby (an expert on traditional uses of plants in the Northwest) and Doug Sackman (who teaches the history of the West at University of Puget Sound), with Stadler moderating.
The panel was short: I could have listened for much longer, not because I was learning about how to fix our cities, especially, but because the information disclosed was so interesting. Mostly, it had to do with the peculiarity of Northwest native settlements, how they ran counter to our ideas of “native” life. Mostly, this has to do with their size and complexity. Northwest native populations were large; the density along the lower Columbia was second only to the population around what is now Mexico City in North America. And the panelists agreed to refer to the settlements as towns, rather than villages, to emphasize how complex they were — how mobile as they stretched out during the warmer months and then contracted in the winter; how much they emphasized trade; how smart their adaptations to their environment were; how they attempted to integrate the first European and American settlers into their network and ultimately were rebuffed.
Some particulars caught my attention. Darby argued that towns were organized around the tending of nearby wapato “patches” (the wapato, the bulb of which is a rich carbohydrate, is also known as “Indian potato”; it grows in shallow ponds and swamps; Lewis and Clark described Native American women harvesting the bulbs by pulling them up with their toes and gathering them when they floated to the surface) and noted that the towns along the Columbia were known for various skills: Wishram, for example, was famous for its medicine men. The towns were, we know, linguistically very different; and thus Chinook Jargon (wapato is a Chinook Jargon word) was a pre-contact necessity — when the common trading language emerged is an ongoing debate. The towns really weren’t “tribes” the way we think of the word today, as a “strong” identity element. The fluidity of Northwest coast life, around the Sound and up and down the Columbia and throughout the region, was one of its primary components. Muskrat robes were important trade goods and by late winter, muskrat was a key part of the diet along the lower Columbia.
Obviously at muskrats, we are far afield from ideas about tending to the edges of European cities, but Sieverts was excellent at making connections as they occurred to him, the similarity of rural Swiss life and that of Northwest Native Americans, for example, or the possibility of tending to agricultural plots at the edge of the edges, like the husbanding of wapato (or actually wife-ing since women probably did most of the wapato work). The life around the Rhine before the efforts to control it began looks a lot like this.
Sackman took the most direct stab (after a fascinating account of the history of Fort Nisqually between Tacoma and Olympia). If we were following Native ideas of urban planning, Sackman said, we would orient our cities to the water, make the harvesting of natural resources a time for social connections (the potlatch), respect each other across boundaries, and live lives of outwardly reaching rootedness, which he argued was the opposite of modern globalization, a phenomena that uproots as it mixes the local and the international. It would not, Stadler and Thrush asserted, involve appropriating Native symbols for such events as the Winter Olympics, which has happened in Vancouver, B.C. (I haven’t mentioned Thrush, but his knowledge of the Coast Salish, including the language, is impressive and his observations are at the heart of many of the generalized comments above.)
“Meaning” in the way Sieverts talks about it has a political dimension, almost inevitably, because our critique of culture nearly always contains a critique of power (I weasel with “nearly always” and “almost inevitably” just because I suppose I can imagine such arguments). The more we appreciate the “urban” organization of the pre-contact lower Columbia or the coastal Salish, the more pointed our conclusions about the featureless edges of our cities, say, our failure to make American cities memorable and thus meaningful. And the sharper our criticism of the power that made them so. I liked the panel because, though it acknowledged this aspect, it ultimately encouraged the audience (and the panelists themselves, I think, at least Sieverts) to speculate, across cultures and across centuries, about where we are today. And it made me want to try some sweet wapato pie…
On Monday at 7:30 p.m. Sieverts will be on another panel, this one with Reed Kroloff and Brad Cloepfil at PNCA (1241 NW Johnson St). With Stadler again moderating, they’ll be debating the question: “How does policy liberate design, or not?” At 6 p.m., a few blocks away at Jimmy Mak’s 221 NW 10th Ave)., Randy Gragg and Metro president David Bragdon “will speak about the upcoming challenges facing Portland’s urban growth boundary, and how to preserve it while enhancing livability for the additional one million residents that are projected to arrive in the next 20-30 years” (per Mr. Gragg), another of the Bright City Lights events that we love to attend. Get there early if you want a good seat.
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This does sound interesting indeed Barry and I wish I were going to be around for the next panel, but if there is a phrase (buzz phrase) that makes me gag on a regular basis it is “young creative.” It’s not even grammatically correct: creative is an adjective, not a noun. And SOME acknowledgement that “older creators,” by which I do not mean godalmighty, have paved the way for those who are up and coming (e.g. Judy Patton and Bonnie Merrill choreographing for the Lovejoy Fountain back in the seventies) would be nice. As for suburbs, even those on the edges of cities (but aren’t they by definition on the edges of cities?) I have to agree with Margaret Mead that the suburb was one of the most destructive social inventions ever created (using a verb here!). Portland is finally, finally becoming a city, a real one, and I do believe high density housing is indeed the way to continue that transformation. I am of course speaking as a New Yorker, who informed her husband in 1966 when we looked at a house to buy in Cedar Hills that if I had to live there I would die.
Comment by Martha Ullman West — October 5, 2008 @ 9:39 am
Barry, your excellent summary of Sieverts’s talk concisely and accurately conveys the main ideas. I especially liked the map that showed how the planning professors actually lived in the sprawly areas rather than the city center. (Not that he actually used the word “hypocrite” or that it’s appropriate.) But I’m not sure I heard an either-or: even in post-bailout America and post Measure 5 Portland, do we have to make giving meaning to the edges and strengthening the center a zero sum game?
I’m looking forward to hearing more of Matthew’s arguments — he’s been eloquent about finding meaning in the edge cities, like Beaverton. But the world is changing right now — soaring energy and construction costs are, if anything, increasing the need to focus on the much more efficient infill development of the inner cities. Sievert also said that Berlin was demolishing a million unoccupied flats. Were those in the central city? If so, wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage people, even in a shrinking population, to move there rather than continue to maintain or further develop the more expensive outlying areas? Portland, of course, is growing, dramatically, and as Randy Gragg and others have warned, we’re not ready to absorb the newcomers. But in an era of high transportation costs, we sure don’t want to pave over more rich farmland surrounding Portland, or pay to build new roads and extend services. I’d much rather see public money spent to provide affordable housing in the inner city. There’s still plenty of room, as Vancouver BC and Manhattan have shown. We’re still less densely populated than LA!
And since this is an art blog, let me provoke some controversy by asking whether (isolated triumphs we can all name aside) the art and community life produced in scattered, relatively homogeneous and isolated suburbs can ever be as rich that achieved in dense, diverse urban environments? Is trying to artificially create meaning, or even the conditions for meaning, on the fringes ever going to compare to the meaning that arises naturally in dense, diverse environments? These are the kind of questions I honestly don’t know the answers to and would love to hear addressed in these discussions. For me, living in inner city Portland has been a far richer experience — culturally, artistically, and in every other way — than that of any suburb I’ve lived in, even in creative places like Austin. What needs to happen next is to support affordable housing in the central areas that makes that experience available to everyone.
Comment by brett — October 5, 2008 @ 11:06 am
Amen, Brett!
Comment by Martha Ullman West — October 5, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
Hmmm. Good question. I guess I think that as Portland grows and gets denser, the difference between living on Foster Rd. or Scholls Ferry Rd or Cornelius Pass and N. Mississippi will start to shrink. It’s already started. So, an artists living anywhere within the Urban Growth Boundary would have a similar existence, equally dense, equally rich. We are still compact enough, though, that even now, I could live in Milwaukie (maybe conviently close to Dark Horse)and avail myself of whatever the city has to offer. When light rail is extended to Milwaukie, it will get even easier. Oregon has a long history, though, of “artist dispersal”. So, James Lavadour, for example, lives near Pendleton, Ken Kesey lived in the countryside outside Eugene, Rick Bartow lives at the coast, Barry Lopez lives in Finn Rock, William Stegner lived near K-Falls, etc. These are visual artists and writers; it’s harder for performance artists (theater, dance, music). But in general, I think one of the things that marks Portland culturally is its deep integration/identification with the rest of the state, even if they live in the city proper.
Comment by Barry Johnson — October 5, 2008 @ 3:38 pm
Good point, Barry. I don’t consider any place in Portland proper to be outside the artistic orbit, really. Creative artists have always lived in either the inner cities where no one wanted to be or out in the far flung suburbs where they could afford the rent. That quintessential avant gardiste composer Erik Satie, for example, lived in Arcueil, which was then considered a far flung suburb of Paris and walked 6 miles or so into town (Monmartre) and back each day for his bar pianist job.
Milepost 5, NW Performance Works, the graphic artists in Milwaukie … they’re all participating in Portland cultural life, and I agree: investing in the green line (which connects colleges, downtown, and deep southeast) and other transit (including bus lines and bike paths) will pay artistic as well as economic dividends. Another argument for more mass transit! Plenty of NY artists live in Brooklyn or Queens and ride the subway to rehearsal or performances, whether uptown or downtown. But I know LA-area artists who are frustrated at their inability to collaborate with others simply because of the distances (at freeway gridlock speeds) involved. Maybe virtual collaboration via the Net can overcome some of this, and as you note, it’s never quite applied to solo practitioners like writers, who can find or create their own occasional communities at universities in college towns or elsewhere.
But forging tighter connections to the central city isn’t quite the same, is it, as what Matthew wants to do in the Edge Cities, which is to encourage pockets of meaning in their own neighborhoods? I don’t know his work well enough to say.
So I guess that raises another question: how far is too far for an artist? When you have to get a babysitter in order to make a rehearsal? When it’s too tiring to go back into the city after dinner? I can and have ridden my bike from downtown to Milepost 5 and PWNW in under half an hour, and the Max or bus can be even faster.
And you raise another fascinating question at the end: as the city develops a true urban identitly, will Portland artists identify less as Oregon (rather than Portland) artists, even t hough proximity to nature and wilderness may have drawn many of them here in the first place? I think of LA artists as LA artists more t han as a subspecies of Californians, and the same with those in the Bay Area, but those distinctions may not seem so distinct when viewed from, say, Soho. I hope Matthew is reading this and can address some of these questions.
Comment by brett — October 5, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
Well, now we are getting into the question, how much is Sieverts and how much is Stadler? I think Matthew accurately identifies signs of “life” outside the central core and rightly wants to celebrate it. I think Sieverts accurately identifies “featurelessness” outside the central core and rightly wants to repair it. But they are talking about two different cities — the growing city of Portland and the static (or declining) city of the Ruhr Valley. Each presents its own set of problems. And I’m still uncertain how the lessons of one might apply to the other, although you’re right, we wouldn’t want “meaningless” suburbs any more than we would want hollowed out central cities. Maybe some of this will become clearer on Monday!
Comment by Barry Johnson — October 5, 2008 @ 5:00 pm
What is central and what is fringe? The East Side neighborhoods where I hang out — Irvington, Sabin, Beaumont, Hollywood, Alameda, Alberta, Mississippi, Sunnyside, etc. — began as suburbs. Now they’re considered close-in. Eighty-second Avenue not too many years ago was no-man’s land. Now, with the rapid growth of new immigrant communities, it’s become an interesting cultural petri dish — in many ways more interesting than the upscale monoculture of the Pearl District. You can argue that Portland itself, like a few other “progressive” cities, has simply turned the donut inside out: the close-in neighborhoods are mostly white, mostly professional, mostly well-off; the actual physical suburbs (at least, some of them) have become what the inner cities used to be: cheaper, more racially and ethnically mixed, the place where immigrants land, home to the economically marginal. Except for their lack of density (and that’s a big exception) they’re more like the old inner cities of the early 20th century than today’s well-to-do inner city neighborhoods are themselves. And you can argue that Portland itself, in an economic and intellectual sense, is a suburb of the larger, more central culture. It’s not a headquarters city, it’s a branch office. It looks to places like New York and London and Chicago and Los Angeles and even bigger neighbors like Seattle and San Francisco for its cultural cues. And, yes, as Barry says, many of our artists embrace the entire state as their creative garden, but that is in a real sense an embrace of the fringe — an insistence, perhaps, that the fringe is important and the center overlooks it at its own peril.
I don’t romanticize the suburbs. I prefer the city, where ideas naturally bump into each other more often because there are simply more ideas bouncing around. But I also suspect that out on the fringes, wherever they might be, you sometimes get a tougher, more real engagement in ideas — the actual sort of clash of viewpoints that can lead to real intellectual reassessment — precisely because you’re not inside the bubble where everyone you deal with thinks more or less the same way you do. Or maybe I AM being overly romantic here.
Comment by Bob Hicks — October 6, 2008 @ 8:47 am
Hi. Excellent and enlightening discussion. I heard an earlier version of Matthew’s edge idea. Sitting in the audience, I always feel inadequate to his idealism. There’s his high vision against the experience of being in a suburb, like Bellevue, where the money flows and not much else, or in an forsaken place like Start Up Washington (I think it’s Start Up but there’s also Concrete; see “This Boy’s Life”), with a feed store, a grocery, a couple of churches and a big bar. I love cities and tend to fear what’s out on the edge. Matthew’s work on fluid and complex Native architecture is wonderful, but fluid cities now don’t work. They empty themselves out. Cities need roots, stems and blooms. Buster Simpson created a park for an etch-a-sketch town in California. He put all the trees in tubs on wheels. Regina
Comment by regina hackett — October 7, 2008 @ 12:16 am
I think that Bob is pretty spot on with the inside-out donut analogy, although there are plenty of ideas bumping around in Beaverton (OSDL Linux Labs, Intel etc.). Plenty of what Bob called ‘tougher real engagement with ideas’ as well…Prostitution on 82nd, Light Rail, the role of Corporations and Cities (Nike/Beaverton) etc.
If you think about it, the satellite (suburb) fairs surrounding Miami’s Art Basel have provided some of the most interesting art…
Comment by stephen cleary — October 7, 2008 @ 8:03 am
When I think of Portland, actually, I think of Forest Grove, too. I think of us as a large ant colony. Some of the branches lead to the nursery where the kiddies are raised. There’s the queen’s palace, of course, the seat of government. There’s a food processing hall. And really the analogy ends there because I truly have NO idea what’s really going on in an ant colony. The point being, it’s just fine for suburbs to be different things. I have my preferences, but I wouldn’t put an end to any of them, neither Lake Oswego nor Canby. I would try to improve them, in the way Sieverts talks about where it’s applicable, where the cityscape is truly featureless and meaningless. But even though I want a vital city core, that doesn’t mean I’m not happy about the tech hubbub in Beaverton or Hillsboro. I benefit from both.
Regina, I know what you mean about feeling inadequate to Matthew’s idealism! I’m going to post a bit more about him a little later. At the end of all of this, I think I thought of him as more practical than I did at the beginning, though. I like thinking about fluid cities — how fluid is too fluid? Interesting. And welcome aboard! (Regina is the art critic for the Seattle P-I and has a very active blog of her own, which we recommend visiting!
Comment by Barry Johnson — October 7, 2008 @ 10:19 am
[...] Fountain-centric City Dance, visual arts group shows Volumeand the Thomas Sieverts-inspired Suddenly for starters, you kind of have to wonder—is urban planning the new [...]
Pingback by Art Scatter » Turning up the “Volume” on planning in Portland — October 10, 2008 @ 9:31 am
[...] On the edge (of cities): past and present It would not, Stadler and Thrush asserted, involve appropriating Native symbols for such events as the Winter Olympics, which has happened in Vancouver, BC (I haven’t mentioned Thrush, but his knowledge of the Coast Salish, … [...]
Pingback by landscape lighting in vancouver, bc | Collection of lighting-related keywords — October 10, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
What is that building with the two blue tops that illustrates this post, part child’s toy and part nuclear power station? If it’s an example of a city without a city, I’m on board. Regina
Comment by regina hackett — November 2, 2008 @ 6:15 pm
It’s part of Sieverts’ Westpark in Bochum, Germany, a big redevelopment project of an industrial site… the photos from that project are pretty amazing…
Comment by Barry Johnson — November 2, 2008 @ 8:22 pm