Before I say anything about last night’s kick off of the selection process for lead designer of Seattle’s proposed new waterfront, I have to say I didn’t know much about the process before I attended the event. I am, in all honesty, ignorant of much of the context of the process and where it goes from here. Unfortunately the event didn’t do much to clear that up for me.
The process is part of replacing Seattle’s collapsing viaduct. But, as an interested citizen I attended with an open mind and armed with a brilliant blog post I read beforehand by Steven Thornton (better known as fnarf) at Seattle Transit Blog titled “Build the Waterfront Up, not Down.” Thornton’s post served as my measuring stick for the presentations by four shortlisted design teams and the process in general. From what I saw and heard, the process and the presentations are coming up short when evaluated from Thornton’s perspective and mine.
First, here’s a flash of Thornton’s brilliance on what a city is:
Cities are markets; they are places where people gather to exchange goods, services, and ideas. Parks do not make cities. Boulevards do not make cities. Dense blocks of commerce make cities. Commerce, commerce, commerce. Rainier National Park is not a city. Manhattan is a city.
Anyone that knows me or my writing knows I am no fan of most organized efforts by the business community in our region to influence policy. I find most of what they do to be a bit too narrow. But Thornton is right, in my view, about what makes a city.
The danger with the discussion about Seattle’s waterfront is that it forgets, frequently, the basic principles of smart growth. All the talk about the city’s “front porch” neglects the reality of cities that work: they are crowded and bustling, not composed of “windswept plazas.” Here are the key things waterfront designers and participants should avoid according to Thornton, to prevent ruining the waterfront.
Boulevards—Thornton rightly points out that in spite of the romantic sound, Boulevards are just really gigantic slabs of pavement that divide a city.
Anyone who’s been to Paris has felt the shock of realizing that the famed Champs d’Elysees is actually the most horrible thoroughfare in the whole city, unless you are a once-a-year bicycle racer, or invading army.
Parks—It is heresy against the true urban faith to call for fewer parks. But I have to agree with Thornton here, at least in terms of the waterfront. Parks, especially poorly designed parks, are killers of hustle and bustle.
Flattening over huge parts of your central city isn’t green. The people who use these parks have to live somewhere, and every foot of living space in the city that is taken for parks is instantly converted by demand into ten feet of living space in the exurbs.
Commerce-Free Zones—These are big boring spaces like our own adolescently self-conscious and self centered Washington Mall in D.C. Big vast swathes of nothingness that looks good from outer space but dwarfs the human scale. Thornton advises
Outdoor cafes. Open markets. Rows of shops, lots of shops, narrow shops all packed together, not giant block-long blank walls.
Not much of what I saw last night was very encouraging. Daniel Friedman, Dean of the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments, presided over what often seemed an intellectual exercise in one-upsmanship between himself and the assembled teams and audience. Friedman was a kind host for an evening that seemed like the design community’s muted answer to American Idol.
It’s too early to tell where Seattle’s waterfront is headed. The tunnel could well be doomed by overruns and much of the process is still in limbo. And there was very little context for what was happening on stage. Just the night before the City hosted a big event touting Seattle’s efforts to go carbon neutral, yet last night’s process seems dependent on building a $4 billion buried highway. Regardless of that, everyone involved (including the participants in last night’s show) or thinking about getting involved should take a few minutes and read Thornton’s post and re-examine some of the assumptions we might hold dear about the future of Seattle’s waterfront.
Kate
Are YOU for real?I think you have it entirely wrong – One of the leading urbanists on the regeneration of how urban spaces work – Jan Gehl discusses the transformation in activities within an urban environment over the past century – from centralized places where yes the activities that Fnarf lists – shopping and selling and trading took place as necessary activities to the rise in optional activities. We don’t have to have centralized locations anymore, so in order compel people to the center, we have to be actually more explicit in the choice to create urban environments where people choose to come, stay, live, raise their kids and socialize. In fact, I would argue the to say that “every ten feet of park spaces causes some one to live in the exurbs” is to misunderstand, and perhaps entirely miss the point that our job as environmentalists and smart growth advocates is to create optimum compact environments where people will want to be. A central waterfront park invites people to have a sense of civic pride and identity and it makes the City more competitive through the optimization of a priceless public amenity.By inviting people who consider the design of public space as an art form in and of itself is something that Seattle can only benefit from. And I do think with your threat of big boring spaces you have missed out on the major movements in landscape urbanism, visit Allegheny park in Pittsburgh, and the Highline in NYC, Brooklyn Waterfront Park.Good god not ONE of the presenters is talking about a new Mall from the 19th century city beautiful movement. 21rst century Duisberg Nord hello? google it.
MicheLynne
Re: City parksWhen you work in the city and bring your own lunch to eat, during lunch hour it’s really nice to have a cute park to go to with benches and picnic tables (some sheltered from the rain, of course). A waterfront park in Seattle would be ideal for this!
Cathy
I missed the presentations Wednesday, but Roger Valdez’s comments resonate strongly with me. Yes of course we need a strip of park connecting the public to the Seattle waterfront, with those nice little tables to eat your lunch. But you need a place to buy your lunch, and coffee, and shop when it is raining and windy, and rent boats and rollerskates, and eat ice cream, and drink a beer. I hope some of the new waterfront plans include lots of things people like to do in a city by the water besides sit in a park.
Kamala
Thanks for the synopsis. Much appreciated by those of us who couldn’t attend. Although I must disagree regarding the need for a park. In order to lure people to live downtown, they need recreation spaces just as much – if not more – than suburbanites with large backyards do. I live in Vancouver, BC and having a linear park all along the waterfront in downtown Van (and most of the rest of the City) is one of the reasons downtown living has been so popular here – much more so than in Seattle. There are also ecological reasons for having and restoring a riparian waterfront. Thanks again for the recap!
MicheLynne
As Kate correctly points out, beautiful urban landscaping would be nice too. Shall we even say *essential*. What we don’t need is an abundance of concrete replacing the behomoth (the viaduct) we’re tearing down. And as Cathy rightly says, we certainly need a variety of outdoor activities offered along with pleasant cafes and shops.
MicheLynne
Kamala, yes! Thanks for chiming in about the important ecological benefits of developing a riparian waterfront. An oasis on the downtown waterfront sounds like a wonderful respite for both man and nature *together.*
mr. roboto
Roger,I couldn’t agree more about the real possibility that Seattle may end up with a largely empty, boring waterfront boulevard and park if the plan for open space isn’t supplemented with meaningful changes to zoning and substantive promotion of development and commerce. Currently, the city is too terrified to suggest making partnerships with private developers that would be a necessary part of building the housing (some of it for really wealthy people) and commercial spaces needed to achieve the kind of active space you, Fnarf, and others dream about. The fear is that the body politic will see anything other than open space as ‘give-aways’ to developers and the rich. Rather than ragging on the design teams, who were specifically warned not to talk about development, it would be great to see you and other forward-thinking urbanists making the case for building a dense, active waterfront neighborhood and business district so that the public and, eventually, the politicians can see the connection between great spaces, density, and public-private partnerships. The Pike Place Market is a great example of how this can be done and would be a useful precedent to show people how the waterfront might work. Every designer wants to create a beautiful, thrilling project full of life and people, but it’s absurd to expect the impetus for changes to the land use development policy at the waterfront to come from the design teams when there isn’t any politic support for it.
Barb
I totally get where Thorton is going advocating for small, eclectic market spaces. It’s why we are all advocating for more mobile food vending in places like the Mt. Baker station. When you think of the Embarcadero as example, much of that space is dead and uninteresting to the pedestrian. I have gone from the Touristy Wharf (which has its purpose) down to the wonderful Ferry Building. The Ferry Building is awesome and I visit it every time I go to SF. It brings activity, vibrancy. The lack of anything in between makes the Embarcadero a blah place. It would likely fail on the Thorton set of criteria. So I agree, more cool places like the Ferry Building, Pike Place Market, etc. bring a lot of excitement to a place.One big point that Thorton fails to recognize as he salivates about how great Manhattan is (and as an urbanist I could not agree more) is Central Park. Central Park is an essential component for livability and what holds together all the density, tall buildings, closeness, narrow streets, urban grit, pushing past, honking horns. I have never walked around in Manhattan where I did not end in, next to or passing through Central Park.
Barb
I totally get where Thorton is going advocating for small, eclectic market spaces. It’s why we are all advocating for more mobile food vending in places like the Mt. Baker station. When you think of the Embarcadero as example, much of that space is dead and uninteresting to the pedestrian. I have gone from the Touristy Wharf (which has its purpose) down to the wonderful Ferry Building. The Ferry Building is awesome and I visit it every time I go to SF. It brings activity, vibrancy. The lack of anything in between makes the Embarcadero a blah place. It would likely fail on the Thorton set of criteria. So I agree, more cool places like the Ferry Building, Pike Place Market, etc. bring a lot of excitement to a place.One big point that Thorton fails to recognize as he salivates about how great Manhattan is (and as an urbanist I could not agree more) is Central Park. Central Park is an essential component for livability and what holds together all the density, tall buildings, closeness, narrow streets, urban grit, pushing past, honking horns. I have never walked around in Manhattan where I did not end in, next to or passing through Central Park.
Deric
How about instead of building a Commerce-Free Zone along the new waterfront, we build a Free-Commerce Zone, think Free Trade Area (FTA) for local economies. A place to pilot deregulation of barriers to business activated space. A place to experiment allowing private businesses to operate on City property (currently illegal), to sell a diversity of food without going through multiple agencies and certifications (I know this is being worked on) or even to sell retail items of low value without a license. I’m sure there are more creative examples out there…
Wells
I was not surprised that the process of selecting a design team was more about finding the right ‘star-chitect’ rather than one which would first deal with mundane matters such as the transportation elements. Putting park design before road and transit system design is sure to backfire. It would be hard to go wrong with any design for the waterfront sans AWV, but SDOT will find a way to make traffic there as oppressive as everywhere else downtown, assaulting any touchy-feeling parkspace filled with seattle’s typical artsy-fartsy oddities.
Jeremy Jones
Roger,It would be helpful to suspend your incredulity and not let Thornton’s (self-described) blowhard tendencies be taken too much to heart. The best of the presentations illustrated the importance of creating and releasing tension at the water’s edge through an intentional design, which is the essence of what the space could best be used for. How exactly that happens in on the table right now. Figuring out how to create the huggermugger and hullaballoo of a superior city waterfront environment (using fine citizens’ input like yours) is the point. Keep going to the meetings and state your case.http://www.jeremy.dk/citiesarepeople/
topographer
The small urbanism advocated by fnarf is indeed noble and more essential in this day and age, but not for this ‘site’. Sites of this nature invite and even deserve the creation of the urban ‘spectacular’ as opposed to the more nomadic urban ‘everyday’. This is your chance to create something spectacular, Seattle, don’t let it go!
eldan
Like a few of the other commenters here and on STB, I found Fnarf’s caricature of new urbanism distractingly hyperbolic. But he does have a point in that making that whole space one big park *or* overplanning what retail goes in there is likely to fail. Lunch spots are important, but a place needs a wide variety of uses if it’s actually going to be busy for enough of the day to (a) really be a worthwhile addition to the city and (b) have enough eyes on the street to feel safe.Kamala from Vancouver is right about their waterfront, but it’s also worth remembering that the linear park is a relatively narrow strip, not the huge expanse that we’d get if we turned everything currently under the Viaduct into one great big park. One of the fantastically useful things about public waterfronts is that the sea provides a wide open space, so we only need to keep a relatively narrow strip by the sea public to give everyone the benefit of this huge opening right next to downtown. Just as long as we keep the surface street slow enough that it becomes easier to cross than the existing Alaskan Way and less dominated by road noise than everywhere within sight of the current viaduct….
eldan
I was thinking about this while looking across the bay from Belltown, and realised that Alki is our model. We have a great public space that’s longer than the central waterfront area but never feels vast and empty because it’s not too wide. And it’s busy enough of the time that when one does find it quiet it’s a pleasant surprise rather than the ambience of neglect at the current waterfront park.What keeps it so busy? Well, across a not-too-hard-to-cross street there are homes, restaurants and bars. Downtown can do better – we can bring in condos, restaurants, bars and cafes in the strip that’s currently under the viaduct, plus we have a lot more potential for daytime use from the piers to one side drawing in tourists and ferry passengers, the workplaces to the other, and space for shops in the new developments. The more a proposed plan allows these uses to mix, the better a 24-hour space we’ll get.
MicheLynne
Vashon Island’s downtown park is where I get my inspiration for enjoying the outdoors, eating lunches at cozy picnic tables, and meeting and greeting the fellow revellers.