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The Lombard Street car restrictions have roundly been deemed a “closure,” a term with negative connotations. The other side of that action, that of opening the area for people, is ignored — as is the fact that auto domination is the status quo on San Francisco’s streets. Any impingement upon that norm that is framed as a loss.

From reading headlines found in other news sources around the country, you’d think the street is simply being closed to everyone. Cars are vaguely mentioned, if at all, while the whole “temporary trials on some afternoons” thing often gets washed over, with Lombard deemed simply and totally “closed.” Here are a few typical examples:

Washington Post: “San Francisco to close off iconic Lombard Street to tourists”

USA Today: “S.F. to temporarily close ‘world’s crookedest street’”

SF Chronicle: “Lombard Street to close on 4 busy weekends this summer”

Put simply, unfettered access by cars is equated with “access”. If one cannot drive there, one cannot go there. And as those important distinctions are blurred, we lose sight of what we deem important uses of our streets.

The verbal gymnastics used to avoid mentioning cars are present not just in headlines, but in everyday conversation. In discussions about behavior on the streets, notice how often the operators of motor vehicles are described as just “people” — for example, “People are always flying down this hill.” Not that drivers aren’t people, but the mode of transport is a key distinction to make. People using other modes usually get explicit labels that posit them as “others” — people on bikes are “cyclists,” and people just walking around are “pedestrians.”

When the discussion is framed in ways like these, the role cars play is put behind the curtain. The conversation then takes for granted that most public space will be devoted to the private automobile, and most people will travel by car.

If we can’t explicitly talk about problems and their causes, we can’t talk about fixing them. And if we can’t acknowledge the subtle ways in which our lexicon is inherently centered around cars, we can’t talk about the ways in which we’ve adapted our lives, and cities, to accommodate their costs.

sf.streetsblog, 23.05.14. photo: sfbike.

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Russian suburbs are organised in mundane repetition. There is a school, a couple of small shops, driveways with huge holes, hopelessly thin young trees and an elderly grey-haired lady concierge. How Russia’s suburbs became creative hotspots

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worth a read on the demise and possible future of high streets.

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The street as a locus of collective memory

[Leonard Nimoy remembers Boston’s West End*]

Thinking about root shock and the reverberations of urban renewal, I remembered this article on urban collective memory I wanted to share.

Michael Hebbert. 2005. The street as a locus of collective memory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol 23, pages 581-596

It was [Maurice] Halbwachs’s belief that all memory is socially constructed around some concept of space: only spatial imagery has the stability to allow us to discover the past in the present (1980, page 167). He studied various frameworks that allow memory to be shared and transmitted: for example, musical notation, the layout of churches and ceremonial spaces, and town plans (1928; 1980). He wrote that, in our perceptions and memory of place, “we are never alone” (1980, page 23). In particular, urban space is a receptacle of collective memory. French geographers had constructed an entire science on the nexus between rural people and their landscapes — Halbwachs dared to suggest that the identity embodied in a city’s streets is even stronger:

"––The place a group occupies is not like a blackboard, where one may write and erase figures at will… The board could not care less what has been written on it before, and new figures may be freely added. But place and group have each received the imprint of the other. Each aspect, each detail of this place has a meaning intelligible only to members of the group, for each portion of its space corresponds to various and different aspects of the structure and life of their society, at least of what is most stable in it" (1980, page 128).

[Urban renewal in New Haven, CT - Oak Street neighborhood, bulldozed and replaced by a highway]

In contrast, 20th century modernist optimism saw the past as slums to be torn down and replaced with the new, the orderly, and the ordering. “Policymakers assumed tabula rasa even in the absence of wartime destruction (Diefendorf, 1993).” Urban renewal was the marching order of the decade. But:

At this moment of total eclipse, Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory was suddenly vindicated by grassroots politics. Across the Western world, urban communities facing the bulldozer reacted to the breaking down of street walls with grief and anger (Marris, 1974). Interviewing slum relocatees in the West End of Boston, Marc Fried (1963) recognised that what his interviewees were experiencing was a bereavement — “intense, deeply felt and at time overwhelming” (page 151).

––”How did you feel when you saw or heard that the building you lived in was torn down?” "It was like a piece being taken from me." "I felt terrible." "I used to stare at the spot where the building stood." "I was sick to my stomach" (page 152).

Observing the Neubau (new building) of German cities in the 1950s, Alexander Mitscherlich (1970) discovered the same sense of psychological abandonment amongst individuals stripped of the shared identity of their urban setting. In The City: New Town or Home Town? (1973) the sociologist Felizitas Lenz-Romeiss contrasted the impersonal `transit-camp’ ambience prescribed by modern town planning with the complex and rich semantic environments of the unimproved street. Reacting against the triumph of the “Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumerism” (1984 [1958], page 65) in the morphologically exploded settings of the suburbs of Paris, Henri Lefebvre explored the meanings of traditional urban form, and demanded an alternative urbanism that would reconstitute the street as a space of continuity, variety, and encounter. Michel de Certeau wrote his two-volume L’Invention du Quotidien (The invention of everyday life) in response to the same “immense social experience of loss of place” (1990, page 155), sending his research team to explore “the true archives of the city”, the spatial practices of everyday life in neighbourhoods where town planners had not yet imposed their standardising logic of production (1990; de Certeau et al, 1994). Back in Boston, reviewing the first appearance of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961), Herbert Gans had rightly predicted that the destruction of street-based environments would send intellectual shockwaves through the modern project (1968, page 30). Direct encounter with the amnesia effect of urban clearance was formative for Jane Jacobs and many other late-20th-century urbanists — Spiro Kostof, Henri Lefebvre, Richard Sennett, Rene Schoonbrodt, Joseph Rykwert — who together restored the Halbwachian conception of urban space as a locus of collective memory.

Selected references from excerpt

Diefendorf J, 1993 In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities After World War II (Oxford University Press, Oxford)

Fried M, 1963, “Grieving for a lost home”, in The Urban Condition: People and Policy in the Metropolis Ed. L J Duhl (Basic Books, New York) pp 151-171

Halbwachs M, 1980 The Collective Memory translated by F J Ditter, V Y Ditter (Harper Colophon, New York); first published in 1950

Marris P, 1974 Loss and Change (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London)

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Bottom up responses to predatory gentrification.

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So…did anyone else notice the speed bump inside 50m to go on Stage 3 of Tour Dubai?

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Abu Dhabi, like any other urban settlement, contains traces of its recent past. In spite of urban developments such traces can still be found and form an important components of the city’s urban experience.

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Officials hope it’ll make streets safer. But pedestrians are often the victim of careless, speeding drivers.

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Gentrification is the word of the day in Oakland. Everywhere you look people are asking, “Am I a gentrifier? Is it bad? Should I care?” What people don’t seem to realize is it isn’t the mere act of moving into a neighborhood that makes you a gentrifier; it’s what you do once you get there.

If you come into someone’s home, do you immediately start rearranging it and moving furniture in? Do you throw away their family photo albums and tell them they have to go to bed at an earlier time or play their music at a lower volume?

No, of course not. You get to know each other, decide if you get along, and, once your host has decided you can stay, you ask politely if there is space to put your stuff. So why do you think you can move into someone else’s neighborhood and start making it over as your own? 

2. Recognize all the people outside of your door as your neighbors, even if they look different from you and live under different circumstances. This includes the homeless who sleep on the street, the drug dealers who sell outside the liquor store, and the prostitutes walking your streets. Replace the words homeless, drug dealer, and prostitute with the word neighbor. Treating these folks with respect and dignity from the beginning will give you later leverage to talk to them about changing their behavior and getting out of the life.

3. Change the way you look at said neighbors by changing the language you use to describe them. Think about the motivations for their actions. Instead of “that prostitute was out all night selling her body” think “my neighbor (insert name here) was forced by her pimp to stand out in the cold all night and have sex with multiple men she didn’t know.” See if that doesn’t change your opinion of her.

13. Recognize Oakland has a very unique and vibrant history and culture, and you were attracted to this city because of the energy that is already here. You should be here to add to that history and culture, not to erase it. We are not San Francisco. We don’t want to be San Francisco. So please don’t try to remake our city in San Francisco’s image. And remember, you don’t gain culture by eating a burrito. You gain culture by engaging in a real and meaningful manner with the person who makes the burrito.

read more: oaklandlocal, 30.01.14.

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I've been in Shanghai (and Dali in Yunnan) doing a class on the urban form of the city.

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HOLZMARKT, BERLIN AT reSITE 2014

At first there was an idea of a corporate waterfront in the center of Berlin. People voted against it. Activists from a group called Holzmarkt25 presented a counter idea of a cultural, student and IT start-up oriented waterfront - and they got successful. Join #reSITE2014 - to meet them!

Register today and get January discount: http://resite.cz/en/registration/

Click here to find more about Holzmarkt

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But is Leipzig Germany’s Austin, a city where every other “hip” twenty-something will soon want to live? Or is Leipzig Germany’s Detroit, a struggling place where small pockets of revival get highlighted while the rest of the city quietly rusts away?

How Leipzig Became ‘Hypezig’ (via theatlanticcities)

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Both China and Dubai share a belief in the stimulating seduction of free zones, governed under robust State or royal power, respectively. China now exports its sovereignty to parts of Africa while buying America’s sovereignty in the form of its national debt. Dubai possesses more free zones than anywhere else in the Middle East, including its “Humanitarian City,” “Media City” and “Internet City.” But what are the long term consequences of this freedom-granting process? What does it mean to cede laws that, in Dubai’s case, have evolved into social exception zones and not just economic ones? At what point does the “freedom” embedded in the “free zone” tip, like the doomed Costa Concordia ship, onto its side?  The following spirited discussion — the first part of which took place in Doha with Keller Easterling and Tarik Yousef — highlights the pleasures and the paradoxes of twenty-first century free zoning.

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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Palestinian poet and filmmaker Hind Shoufani moved to Dubai for the same reasons that have attracted millions of other expatriates to the glitzy emirate. In 2009, after decades in the storied and mercurial Arab capital cities of Damascus and Beirut and a sojourn in New York, she wanted to live somewhere stable and cosmopolitan where she also could earn a living. Five years later, she’s won a devoted following for the Poeticians, a Dubai spoken-word literary performance collective she founded. The group has created a vibrant subculture of writers, all of them expats.

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How much has Qatar changed since 2003?

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Architect Frank Gehry says there are only two buildings in his hometown worth saving: Old City Hall and Osgoode Hall. Everything else is fair game to be torn down, Mr. Gehry suggested to Toronto and East York Community Council on Tuesday morning. “I don’t know whether we should be designating heritage buildings,” said Mr. Gehry, who was born in Toronto. “I think you should preserve [Old] City Hall because I used to go there when I was a kid.”

Mr. Gehry, 84, also said we should save Osgoode Hall, home to the Law Society of Upper Canada and the Ontario Court of Appeal. Other than that, “the old General Hospital building I was born in should have been sacred. It was torn down.

what…