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Category Archives: incremental change

Abandonment, Authenticity, and Transgressive Placemaking

30 Thursday May 2013

Posted by Kelly Bennett in cities, historic preservation, incremental change

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Abandoned, Authenticity, Night Heron, Placemaking, Preservation, Riff, Transgressive Placemaking

Image

Photo by Yoni Brook via The Night Heron

When people talk about how a city is “real,” they’re talking about the parts that make it a little dangerous. Places that have been abandoned, whether by rules or by people. Times Square before Disney. West Chelsea before the High Line. Hell, the High Line before the High Line. Authenticity is at the center of conversations within historic preservation, urban development, and placemaking. We want our places real, but not too real. Especially not if we have to live there. But if we don’t use a place — really live in it — we get ruins at best and lost history at worst. Is that enough? Do we need abandonment for authenticity?

A city’s lifecycle includes a certain amount of abandonment. A building outlives its usefulness, a factory closes, a tenant moves out. Abandonment may not be so deliberate as it is a disconnect between timing and value. It doesn’t make sense at this particular point in time, for this particular cost, to use this building. Even Ellis Island was abandoned.

Abandoned Ellis

NPS Photos – Ellis Island Before and After Restoration.

EllisgreathalltodayNPSphoto

The Tenement Museum, in New York City, sits between restoration and abandonment. The detail I remember best is the portrait of FDR on the wall of one of the apartments. It hung there through the Great Depression and for another 50 years after its owners moved out. With too many fires destroying buildings’ only route of escape, New York City updated its codes to outlaw wooden staircases. The landlord couldn’t afford to put in metal stairs, so the building sat empty until it was rediscovered, now a time capsule. The museum has since restored several of the apartments, telling the personal stories of the families who lived there. They’ve also kept some apartments as stabilized ruins, just as they were when the museum founders discovered the mothballed building. Bare wood, cracked plaster, peeling wallpaper, closer to authentic. Closer to abandoned.

Our experience and perception of public space, history, and abandonment has been changed by photography and the internet. There are Facebook pages dedicated to old photos of places past their prime. Urban spelunking photography is now its own genre, museum exhibits and all. You can even take tours of abandoned places, some more dangerous than others. It’s turned into its own industry in some places. We can see the process of decay and we must really like it. By sharing images of abandoned places, are we making them public again? Taking ownership of them? 

At the intersection of abandonment, urban spelunking, and public art, is the Wanderlust School of Transgressive Placemaking. Their most recent project was a complete reimagining of public space — a speakeasy inside a water tower atop an abandoned building in Manhattan. There was a band. There were drinks. The bar, tables, and chandelier were made of piano parts. Your ticket was a pocket watch that only a friend who had been their previously could give you. Just read Dan Glass’s story about it in The Atlantic Cities. A closely related group, Wanderlust Projects, led an exploration of Brooklyn’s abandoned Domino Sugar factory and held a jazz show in an abandoned Pennsylvania honeymoon resort. Now they’re starting a series of talks on urban exploring and remaking invisible places. Is this the next wave of public art? Adaptive reuse? Temporary preservation? Whatever it is, I want more.

Photo by Yoni Brook via The Night Heron

Photo by Yoni Brook via The Night Heron

 

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A City of Missing People

25 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by Kelly Bennett in decline, Detroit, incremental change, Jobs, ruins

≈ 2 Comments

Detroit's Michigan Central Station

Tourists usually pick a place to visit that’s the best at something. New York and Chicago have their skyscrapers. Orlando has its amusement parks. Detroit has decay. My wife and I stayed there a few days last summer and, honestly it was just sad. Detroit was built for 2 million people but only 700,000 people live there now. It’s a city of 1.3 million missing people. Detroit has this endless supply of buildings–wonderful buildings–that nobody uses. That’s what really gets to me about this city. All the lost potential, wasted effort, abandoned beauty. The world’s biggest ghost town.

I just saw  Detropia, a film that explains the problems of Detroit through a collage of lives, no narrator. It doesn’t get overly nostalgic and it’s not a movie of “ruin porn,” although you can’t tell Detroit’s story without ruins. Detroit’s strategy is to invest in its best places and try to build outward again. Some young people are moving downtown and that’s probably the best way for the city to start over. The problem is, the city can’t really afford to invest in itself anymore. It’s spread out over 140 square miles and it just can’t support its current population with this massive infrastructure footprint. When there’s block after block with one house where there used to be 20, how can you afford to maintain the streets, water and sewer lines, the police and fire departments, or even to plow the snow?

The thing that builds a city, millions of people making individual decisions, has been the undoing of Detroit. It’s become a repository for the state’s poor, and when they’re lucky enough to find more work, they leave. It’s a logical decision. The city is so far gone, so disappeared, that I’m afraid no matter how much the economy recovers, pretty soon it just won’t be a logical place for anyone to live.

Corktown neighborhood

Grand Army of the Republic Building, built for Detroit's Union Civil War veterans

Parking Lots are Bad Neighbors

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by Kelly Bennett in cities, incremental change, urban planning

≈ 4 Comments

Parking Lot #33 by Jason Brockert

City planning was a reaction to industrialization: smokestacks make bad neighbors, so cities created zoning. Who would want to live near a smoke-belching factory? It was dangerous and unhealthy. And it smelled bad. London had “dark satanic mills.” Pittsburgh was “hell with the lid off.” But, zoning has since evolved to not only separate the industrial from the residential, but to separate commercial from residential, and residential (apartments) from residential (single-family). What in the world is zoning protecting me from there? The way I see it, it’s cars. Well, parking lots. And that’s creating a cycle of urban decline and reliance on oil (and deteriorated water quality, poor air quality, obesity, yada, yada).

We’ve had two themes running through planning for the last 75 years, and where they overlap is in the parking lot. The first theme is, make it easy for me to drive my car anywhere, whenever I want. Second, keep those cars away from my house! Here’s the problem: When you live in a city where everyone has a car, your stores need to have parking lots. But, who wants to live next to a parking lot? So zoning ends up separating your neighborhood grocery from your neighborhood. Then everyone has to drive there. Then it needs a bigger parking lot. Etc.

Right now, most cities have parking requirements built into their zoning codes. Want to put a yoga studio in your house? Good luck. You’ll probably have to supply enough parking spaces as if every person taking yoga with you drove by themselves. (And, be honest — they probably would.) But, big retailers, churches, and office buildings very often supply much more parking than is required. The retailers build their parking lots for the biggest shopping day of the year, churches want enough parking spaces for every seat in the sanctuary, and the owners of office buildings want flexibility for any possible tenant. And when you get a bunch of these buildings next to each other, you get parking lot after redundant parking lot. And you have to drive there.

So, how do we begin to solve this mess and pull our cities back together? It may fix itself, but not in a way that many of us would enjoy. If gas prices rise sharply, people won’t want to drive as much or as far as they do now. In the end, the market will react and we’ll probably see a trend back to neighborhood-scale retail and services. But what if we actually wanted our city policies to create a place where we could choose not to drive?

City policies could squeeze from two directions — do away with some minimum parking requirements and add parking maximums. It probably won’t destroy any neighborhoods to allow businesses up to a certain square footage to rely on on-street parking. And I’m sure we could come up with reasonable numbers for a maximum number of parking spaces for different land uses.

And what if we separated parking requirements from individual buildings? We do that in many downtowns. By virtue of locating in a walkable urban center, building owners are not required to provide parking, and it somehow works out. What if we did that in other places? Just said, we have enough parking here. No asphalt required. Or, no more asphalt, period. In growing suburban areas, it might actually inspire useful development of those empty spaces. And it could discourage tear-downs in more urban neighborhoods, too.

This is an incremental policy change, obviously. But building a city is incremental itself. Without changing the whole framework for city planning, this is how we make better places to live.

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