Cars form a houndstooth pattern in a parking lot at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. (From original caption in the book)
I was looking for a completely different book of photographs at the library (see earlier post on Sa-i-gu) and when I couldn’t find it in the stacks, remembered to go look on the folio shelves. (aw yeah, who’s the child of a librarian) And found a book that really should be a required text in urban planning Look at the Land: Aerial Reflections on America
Bill McKibben wrote the text for this truly revelatory collection of photography by Alex MacLean
Viewed from eye level or satellite, the earth appears static, unlikely to change in significant ways. The block of city homes is so solid, the continents so fixed and staid in their positions. But pan in or out, and suddenly there’s a sense of the flow of time across the surface, the wash of change. The Pacific slams against the city grid of San Francisco, great combers surging in, taunting the rows of homes. The picture says: this line between land and sea is a provisional fiction of a short moment. Give it time and the line will shift. (p. 35)
More from Bill McKibben on MacLean’s photos:
We live in strange clusters, utterly unconnected to the topography (a change from the time when human settlements followed the logic of the land). Clearly, access to a cul-de-sac, that bulbous, slightly obscene marker of our civilization, is more prized that access to a stream. Our homes tell us nothing about our physical surroundings — we look out on mirrors of our economic status.
The odd feature of these endless subdivisions, though, is that all their coiling and twisting is clearly to enhance individual privacy — there is scant sense of public life here. A community pool, where all might gather and talk and share the work of child care? No, an endless row of private pools, a cumulative Lake Erie of chlorinated blue, defining our timidity about our fellows. (p. 143)
Alex MacLean got into aerial photography from a community planning course. I love many of his photos, but the caption I love the most is ”Rejected Tomatoes Dumped From a Moving Truck Leave Blush and Pale Green Strokes Across a Field as Seen From 1,000 Feet Above Eastern Ohio.”
Learned about the St. Louis housing complex Pruitt Igoe through the blog Strange Harvest. The post’s opening paragraph reminds me a bit of the book The World Without Us.
“Except of course that Pruitt Igoe, the giant housing scheme designed by Minoru Yamasaki and completed in 1956, isn’t there. Beginning with a spectacular implosion in 1972, it had been completly demolished by 1976. Famously, that first implosion was dubbed the ‘Death of Modernism’ by Charles Jencks. Almost all traces of the sites life as a huge housing scheme have been erased. It is now a forest – a surreal and unsettling landscape that has grown out of the debris dumped on the site from other demolitions.”
After studying Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier and the rest of the utopian reformers, it’s sobering to come across the visual demise of their architects-know-best version of urban planning.
"The construction of a city must, indeed, be designed to facilitate the transaction of its business; but what is the business of Honolulu? Yours is not, and does not aspire to be, an industrial or a great commercial or financial city; it is that rare thing, a city of delight, seeking to give leisure and pleasure; flaunting, not volumes of black smoke, but green hills and blue seas, the rainbow and the palm. And if your business is to give pleasure and to be beautiful, you can afford in unwonted measure to be conservative about changes; to shun the “checker-board plan” as you would the plague, and to retain the narrow, winding streets."
— The Beautifying of Honolulu (1906), by pioneering American urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson.
A Youtube flurry led to the discussion that hip-hop videos are all about place. Biggie Smalls, Nas, ok pretty much any New York rapper has shot a music video of a saunter through the neighborhoods of his youth.
Go West Coast, and although Tupac hops into the convertible by the third frame, the camera is still moving along iconic vistas of Los Angeles institutions, strip-malls, and palm trees.
This idea of urban placeness, a fierceness of home in spite of decay or danger (or sometimes as a result of those difficulties) comes up in the introduction to The New American Ghetto, a ginormous book of photography and musings on the semi-abandoned neighborhoods of the American city by Camilo Jose Vergara.
Cora Moody, the president of the tenants’ association at the Hayes Homes in the Central Ward of Newark, lived for ten years in a now-derelict building, part of the Hayes development, that she calls “a piece of my history.” Contrasting with what remains — the stinking vacant structure, with its broken windows and its entrance full of garbage and excrement — is the vital community that the building once anchored: “I was pregnant with my fifth child when I moved in there. I can see my kids playing hopscotch, I can hear them outside my window, calling up for money.” Pointing to a littered, overgrown spot on the grounds, she says: “There used to be a shower there. My kids would use it at all times during the summer, even at midnight, and I would not be worried. There were public telephones in here; you could use them. You could wait, you did not have to get your own phone right away. We did not have to worry about people hurting us. There was a community in there of people you could trust and got along with. ” Cora explains why she sees the ruined building with so much affection, saying: “You cannot shift memories to another place. These are my greatest memories. They took all that away from us when they closed the building.” The present is inscribed on a wall nearby: “Shahonna Tovheedah in the motherfucking house. If you don’t like it kiss my ass.”
I think I love cities so much because there are so many memories soaked into every street. I want to do for Seoul what Historypin is trying to do for every city. Or what Vergara did for one storefront in Harlem…
Compulsively collecting places. Ph.D. student in urban & regional planning at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Former resident of Seoul & San Francisco.
