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Times Square, New York City.

Assignment 7— Placemaker

'Visual literacy' is a term that is used to express the ability of preservationists (and others) to 'read' the built environment. But, as noted by Hiss and other authors who consider PlaceMakers, understanding the environment (built, as well as natural and social) involves many more senses, including common sense: the collective thoughtfulness of a community.

Various Methodologies

'Experience of Place' of Hiss

Tony Hiss, in The Experience of Place ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1990) provides "a new way of looking at and dealing with our radically changing cities and countryside."

"Luckily, we have a hidden ally -- or, if not hidden, at least a long neglected, overlooked and undervalued one. This ally is our built-in ability to experience places directly, an ability that makes it possible for people to know personally, through their own senses, about many of the ways our surroundings work within us. Paying careful attention to our experiences of places, we can use our own responses, thoughts, and feelings to help is replenish the places we love."

"This underlying awareness -- I call it simultaneous perception -- seems to operate continuously, at least during waking hours, even when our concentration seems altogether engrossed in something else entirely. . . . It broadens and diffuses the beam of attention evenhandedly across all the senses so we can take in whatever is around us -- which means sensations of touch and balance, for instance, in addition to all sights, sounds, and smells."

"With the help of this extra sense, the familiar hard-and-fast boundary between ourselves and our surroundings seems softened, expanding our sense of the space occupies by 'here' and the time taken up by 'now,' and uncovering normally ignored patterns of relationships that makes us part of larger groups and events. It's simultaneous perception that allows any of us a direct sense of continuing membership in our communities, and our regions, and the fellowship of all living creatures." (pages xii-xiii)

'A Pattern Language' of Alexander

In 1977 Christopher Alexander, et al, published A Pattern Language (cited herein) and The Timeless Way of Building, (New York: Oxford University Press), two volumes that, respectively, provide a language for building and planning and provide the theory and instructions for using the language.

"It is shown . . . that towns and buildings will not be able to become alive, unless they are made by all people in society, and unless these people share a common pattern language, within which to make these buildings, and unless this common pattern language is alive itself."

"The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." (page ix-x)

"The patterns are ordered, beginning with the very largest, for regions and towns, then working down through neighborhoods, clusters of buildings, buildings, rooms and alcoves, ending finally with details of construction. . . . Each pattern is connected to certain 'larger' patterns which come above it in the language; and to certain 'smaller' patterns which come below it in the language."

" In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns; the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are imbedded in it."

"This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it." (page xii-xiii)

    Bryant Park, New York

Public Places' of Danzer

Gerald A. Danzer, in his Public Places: Exploring Their History (Nashville: The American Association for State and Local History, 1987) writes "about the public aspects of our nearby history, those buildings and places that pertain to the life of the people as a whole. . . . This book's purpose is to consider the public dimension of the local environment, to see the environment as a product of historical forces, and, finally to contemplate the relationship of individual members of the community to the places where they encounter each other." Danzer's divides public places into five categories: monuments, buildings, town plans, streets, open spaces, and, in summary public places as community. (page xi)

In addition, Danzer observes, "By definition, both public places and history itself center on people. Along with time and space, people form an essential ingredient in any study of nearby history. Spaces become places because human beings use them and shape them according to their cultural needs. Time, as it exists in its natural state, as the rhythm of the seasons or as an astronomical event, is of little interest to historians. But when it relates to individuals as personal time in a life cycle, or to groups as civic time or as cultural expression, it becomes the very stuff of history. By comparing the lives and works of people over time, it is possible to discern the elements of change and continuity between one point in the past and another." (Appendix C, page 124.)

'Spaces, Sacred and Profane' of Jackson

John Binkerhoff Jackson, in 'Discovering the Vernacular Landscape' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, a compilation of essays, including "A Pair of Ideal Landscapes," which included a discussion of 'Spaces, Sacred and Profane," noting "Wherever we go in the contemporary landscape we run across these signs: boundaries roads, and places of assembly. We read them at once, and we not only read them, we create them ourselves, almost without realizing that without then we could not function as members of society. To me this universal need -- and universal ability -- to organize space, to divide it into microspaces, assemble them into macrospaces, is impressive evidence that there is a common, unchanging human nature. But each age, each society develops its own unique kind of spatial organization. There are societies which cannot rest until they have defined every space, natural or man-made, in conveniently human or political categories. If, for instance, there is a river, it is immediately thought of in terms of navigation or water power. If there are mountains they need to be used for defense or grazing or the providing of wood, and if there is open country, it is to be divided up into farms and home lots and given a system of roads.

"The message here is that in the political landscape the natural environment has no inherent identity of its own: it is simply a means to an end, a human end, and space is consequently organized so that every group, every activity has its own well-defined space. (page 27-28)

'Real Places' of Clay

Grady Clay in An Unconventional Guide to Real Places: America's Generic Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) considers the history of a place (time and space, respectively) in a dynamic, interactive way by using his 'cross-section' method of investigation: the plotting, mapping, and navigating routes across towns, cities, and regions of America (with time and space, here used as part of his method).

He notes: "All such trips are experiments with continuity. The word 'continuity' I see in a special light, and as a tactic for coming to grips with new environments. It is never enough to work with maps alone, or documents alone -- although all history depends on both. Nor is enough to interview Usually Reliable Sources along the route. To come to an understanding of places requires all these: maps, documents, histories, interviews, photography, careful observation. But, above all, understanding depends upon the continuity of moving self-consciously and completely through a place -- in-one-side-and-out the-other -- and then repeating the process over time." (page x-xi)

To help consider these times and places from the perspective of our consciousness and language, Clay identifies and critically assess the places, and what we call them. He observes, "These terms. . . Arise from that vast pool of familiar generic names used in American discourse about the places where we live, work, and play. We build these man-made inventions-and-conventions out of thin air. . . . They are parts of grammar we inherit and adapt to negotiate changing worlds. This grammar is to be studied with care and disregarded at risk. We test its terms against everyday experience in the marketplace of language. In a democratic society, it is important for image and reality to stick tight to each other. Our meaningful world is what we can describe to each other with a good chance of being understood. Generic place-names are essential lubricants." (page xviii)

Main Street, Superblock, Greenbelt, Tent City, Shortcut, the Strip, Ghost Town, the Public Domain; all these are generic place names identified by Clay, who concludes, in his epilogue, "This age-old naming process was, and is, essential to the sorting-out process as we expand language to negotiate with, and to change, environments. When we add new terms, they further influence the way we think, The research leading to these pages has identified some four thousand generic man-made places, from Abandoned Area to Zoological Gardens, In their millions of specific examples, these have altered the rainfall, land use, and temperature patterns of the whole earth. From that great mountainside this book carves out a small slice of 124 generic man-made places." (page 268)

With reference to his 'cross-section' examination, Clay notes, "Such a viewing process forces one to look at the whole great enterprise, which is the modern urbanized nation. This examination deals with its focal points, cruxes, fluxes, and transition locations. It starts from The Center and proceeds outward through that wide belt of dynamic tension called The Front, and terminates in the great Out There. Such a cross-section view cuts across major segments of life. It takes what comes next. It enables us to rediscover that scarcely anything left Out There has not been, in one way or another, urbanized. And there is no permanence in it." (page xxii)

'PlaceMakers' of Fleming and von Tscharner

Ron Fleming and Renata von Tscharner are principals of the Townscape Institute, whose pioneering townscape work has influenced a generation of planners, preservationists, and architects. PlaceMakers: Public Art That Tells You Where You Are (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Townscape Institute, 1981), serves as a catalyst for public art initiatives, especially in the 80s when funding for public art was greater.

The authors note, "There is a spectre haunting America. . . . It is a spectre of placelessness, We have created a banal sameness everywhere in America. It haunts the old commercial strip on the road to the airport as well as the sparkling new development downtown. . . . They remain dead spaces that tell no tales, supporting only a rather general condition of angst and anomie which learned commentators ascribe to our age" (page 7)

"It is into this world that the 'place makers' and 'place making' actions should be welcomed. This book profiles objects that help to define, reveal, enrich, reinforce, expand, or otherwise make accessible, place meaning. . . . It is about sculpture and objects, reliefs and pavement inserts, fountains and fragments, benches and bollards, murals and wall markers." (page 7) Specifically sites include: Mags Harries' Asaroton (1976) bronze replicas of streetscape debris in Boston's outdoor fresh produce market, Haymarket; Richard Beyer's Waiting for the Interurban (1978), a life-size aluminum sculpture of six people in Freemont, Washington waiting on the sidewalk for a trolly that will never come; and George Segal's The Steelmakers (1980), in Federal Plaza, Youngstown, Ohio, which depicts two life-size bronze workers against a backdrop of an actual blast furnace and steel infrastructure.

Preservationists are by no means the only professional who best help preserve a place, for preservation happens constantly, in the present moment -- in the making. Here and now, it is often public artists who are best able to realize the essence of a place and concurrently capture the feelings and perceptions of a community otherwise disenfranchised from its environment. The authors note, "One objective of the book is to emancipate people from limiting notions of what is historically important or architecturally significant and to encourage them to invest as well as to acknowledge meaning in the ordinary places they live." (page 8)

The authors continue, suggesting that placemakers will have different effects, "Some transform the very character of a place. . . . [Others] add a layer of decorative richness which does not transform and environment, but which embellishes and sometimes commemorates it."

And lastly, "This connection between place makers and the memories and associations they release we call 'crystallization.' It is a work that Stendhal used in his treatise On Love more than a century and a half ago to describe they way objects in the environment recalled associations between a lover and his beloved and consequently enriched the lover's view of the beloved. He derived the analogy from the observation of how a bare tree branch left in a salt mine is in time covered with dazzling crystals. We reuse crystallization to describe the way objects in the environment create or reinforce this mental landscape of place meaning in the minds of people who are both familiar with an area or simply passers-by.

'Power of Place' of Gallagher

Winifred Gallagher's The Power of Place (New York: Simon &;Schuster, 1993) has a subtitle that addresses, "how our surroundings shape our thoughts, emotions, and actions."

"These days, any big conference of scientists concerned with the future of our planet or species includes presentations and discussions of aspects of the relationship between people and places." (page 17)

"Just as the world around us affects our behavior, our thoughts, emotions, and actions affect our surroundings. When asked to predict the most important environmental influence on behavior in the twenty-first century, researchers almost invariably give the same answer: urbanization, or making places citylike without necessarily making cities. Yet it would be equally accurate to say that urbanization is also the most important behavioral influence on the environment. The technological and social changes associated with this unprecedented worldwide development mean that before we superficially adjust to a new, lower status quo, our ever-adaptable species must understand what a good environment really is, in a community as well as a forest, in an office and school as well as a home. Burdened with increasingly complex social roles, we need places that support rather than fragment our lives, places that balance the hard, standardized, and cost-efficient with the natural. Personal, and healthful. To secure this kind of environmental quality in a rapidly changing world, we must put the principles emerging from the multidisciplinary science of places into practice on local and global levels." (page 19)

"Environmental activists urge us to 'think globally, act locally,' but what scientists are learning about the relationship between places and behavior suggests that thinking locally isn't a bad idea, either. . . . Once we realize that just about anything that is true of our relationship with our homes is true concerning our neighborhoods, regions, and nations, then thinking locally will actually mean acting globally, and that means saving the world."

'Placemaking' of Schneekloth and Shibley

Placemaking; The Art and Practice of Building Communities, by landscape architect Lynda H. Schneekloth and planner Robert G. Shibley (New York: John Wiley &;Sons, Inc., 1995) uses case studies from the authors' practices to address the relationship between communities, design professionals, and the shaping of their physical places.

"Placemaking is the way all of us as human beings transform the places in which we find ourselves into places in which we live. . . . Placemaking is not just about the relationship of people to their places; it also creates relationships among people in places.

"Professional placemakers -- architects, planners, building tradespeople, facility managers, interior designers, engineers, and landscape architects -- share a practice concerned with the making of places as a full-time vocation. As professional practitioner of placemaking, the work that we do in helping to make the world is critical to the functioning of our culture and we take pride and joy in it. And yet, the allocation of such work to a small body of professionals is fundamentally disabling to others. In most industrialized countries, placemaking has been assigned to and appropriated by design-related professionals and academics who claim expert status regarding the knowledge of making places. Such appropriation ultimately disempowers others because it denies the potential for people to take control over events and circumstances that take place in their lives." (page 1-2)

". . . [we] offer these stories as a demonstration of professional practice that focuses on enabling and facilitating others in the various acts of placemaking even while offering expertise in such discrete acts as planning, design, scientific inquiry, representation, construction, destruction, and maintenance." (page 5)

"People know many things about the places in which they live, although this knowledge is often unstructured, informal, and hesitant. It is not the kind of knowledge normally given voice in professional arenas and could therefore be called a form of subjugated knowledge. A critical practice of placemaking attempts to give legitimacy to all forms of knowledge. As such, it does not privilege any single interpretation or professional perspective over the dynamics of the whole place."

"An enabling practice also attends to relationships as a goal of placemaking -- the relationships between people and between people and their place. . . . Furthermore, before professional knowledge about design, planning, engineering and so on, can be understood, it must be situated and transformed in relationship to the people in places."

The authors note three tasks for in the process of placemaking: (1) creating an open space for conversation; (2) appreciating "the concrete experience of place as it has been made and experienced over time by the various inhabitants" and, concurrent, critical analysis; and (3) the "framing of action" to reveal the opportunities for activities in the place.