February 15, 2010
Volutes and Glass.
A few more hours contemplating later, and I’m excited to announce a big makeover for the site. In addition to the LU blog, I’ll be expanding the site to include a creative portfolio and a photo gallery. Things will be coming along in phases so expect me to return to making tidbits and blurbs on the blog by March 27th. It will take longer to get the ball rolling for the portfolio and gallery, so expect openings in succession over the year. My portfolio will essentially contain creative plans, renderings, drawings, maps, etc. of visionary concepts and ideas within the urban fabric of the built environment. Work will range from architectural plans of real buildings to master plans and drawings of visionary developments. The photo gallery will contain images of transport, streetscapes, skylines, communities, and much more of goings-on in urban Puget Sound. Work featured in the blog can be found in the gallery. Dates will hopefully be coming soon.
January 24, 2010
An appreciation for Yaletown, Vancouver
After a few weeks of contemplation, I’ve decided to revive this blog, Lingua Urbana. However, it will not be in its full and original form. As everything stands now, I’m comfortably contributing to two major outlets: the Bellevue City News blog at the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Transit Blog. Both have given me tremendous opportunities to write on issues I care about that are grounded in the real world. However, I always thought that keeping a personal website should be in order.
So after some thought, I decided that Lingua Urbana will return as a much more personal-oriented blog. The content will be focused on tidbits, blurbs, appreciations and experiences I encounter in my urban and suburban worlds. It won’t be so much a diary of daily affairs, but I will do short simple posts on pictures I take and things like bus rides, neighborhood excursions, and issues quasi-relevant to urbanism. Content will be light and periodic, probably about a post a week.
You won’t see lengthy editorials or case studies about transit. That will be found at the Seattle Transit Blog. And of course, Bellevue-related news will be reported on at the Seattle P-I. Hopefully, this new change will bring out a more personable face to my online rants and raves. Unfortunately, my academic, writing, and extracurricular schedules won’t make this a priority for a couple more months. So for what it’s worth, I hope to have an overhaul and a return by March 27, 2010. See you soon!
October 25, 2009
After being in business for only about three months, Lingua Urbana may finally be meeting its end. I’m currently doing a major transition in blogging priorities which may result in the subsequent stoppage of new posts here. In no way, shape, or form does that mean I have decided to stop blogging. On the contrary, you may notice an increase in my post activity through other outlets.
I was recently asked to hop on as a contributor to the Seattle Transit Blog, so my future blurbs about transit and land use will most likely to show up there. The blog has a very articulate and intelligent team well versed in transit and transportation issues, so even posts not by me are worth a read. Some of my transit-related posts here will be cross-posted over there along with the integration of some of the Lingua Urbana archives. As far as my Progressively Unsuburban blog at the P-I goes, it will begin to shift focus towards issues surrounding real estate, community development, neighborhood planning, urban renewal, architecture, etc. None of it is too far off base from the whole “I love cities!” demeanor, but there will be some distinction between the two blogs.
As far as Lingua Urbana goes, it will remain online for a bit for archival and transitional purposes, but there will be a time when it will be wiped off the face of the earth (probably after my registered domain expires). Continue to follow me at the two aforementioned blogs! Until next time.
October 20, 2009
[Cross-posted at Progressively Unsuburban]
'Sound Transit' emblazoned on a Link train
Frankly, I wasn’t around actively advocating for Sound Transit’s Central Link when it was being conceived, but one common criticism that I’ve heard rail opponents iterate time and time again is that the Central Link alignment was some sort of a political gimmick. “Why Tukwila of all places? People don’t go to the airport on a daily basis. Why not Bellevue?” First of all, it’s rather ironic that the same people wanting to block light rail to Bellevue (and anywhere else in general) are the same people who criticize the Central Link alignment and throw their hands up in the air asking why the suburbs were not the first destination. It’s a fair indication that these people are just against rail in general under the pretense of a whole laundry list of other excuses.
As Jim Miller incorrectly and manipulatively implies, Central Link wasn’t built to make Seattle feel like a “real city. ” It was built as a buffer to initiate the expansion of a much larger high capacity transit system in the Puget Sound area. However, what really gets me is when people start calling the line Mayor Nickels’ “pet project” and some kind of a political ploy. Strangely enough, the line is anything but political. Especially when you consider the mayor lives in West Seattle.
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October 18, 2009
[This is the first of either a two or three-part series regarding community and urban renewal/revitalization efforts in Seattle.]
Columbia City Farmers Market
The topic of urban renewal or regeneration often brings up visions of glassy mixed-use developments in neighborhoods upzoned from what were once concrete tracts of land filled with industrial warehouses. But when you look beyond the redevelopment of properties and buildings, there’s a lot more to the success story of urban renewal than simply real estate. Darryl Smith, a realtor and resident of Columbia City, is an example of the few community residents that have stepped up over the years to transform and retake neighborhoods that were once plagued with adversity. I had a recent opportunity to hear Darryl talk about his efforts in the revitalization of Columbia City and how, through a series of community efforts, he was able to help bring one of the darkest areas of the city into what is today one of Seattle’s most thriving neighborhoods.
If there is a driving force that enables such a mass empowerment of neighborhood revitalization, it is the community grassroots movement. Although often prescribed as a political device, grassroots has found significant success across the country from cracking down on drug deals to driving out perpetrators of hate-crime. Darryl’s most effective tool was enabling community neighbors to act far faster than any municipal entity. At the base of these actions were simple and small meetings to gather the brainstorming collective– what could be done to better the neighborhood? Over the course of several years, the Columbia City Revitalization Committee literally took back the neighborhood from the druggies, pimps, prostitutes, gangsters, and other folk with unsavory intentions. It was events like a small-scale music festival, pancake breakfast, and lawn-chair cinema that brought people out of their homes and onto streets like Rainier Avenue South, even at night.
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October 14, 2009
New rendering of East Link on I-90
I’m currently at the South Bellevue East Link workshop to take notes and ask about some key issues facing Link. I’ve got no access to wi-fi or internet, so I won’t be live blogging, but these are real-time notes as they happened.
5:16pm: I’ve arrived at Bellevue High School for the South Bellevue East Link workshop. Supporters of the B7/BNSF ROW alignment are outside handing out literature in defense of that particular alternative. I take one and politely brush past them.
5:20pm: An open workshop with a number of booths is set up for public input. The presentation is scheduled to begin around roughly 5:30pm. Each booth has renderings and drafts of different phases of the guideway that follows the preferred alternative. I hear a very elderly gentleman utter “that from everything [he's] read, those trains can’t run across the I-90 bridge!” I hold my tongue.
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October 13, 2009
Sounder at King Street Station (from Wikimedia)
The Kansas City Light Rail blog has a post up with a table comparing the years in which rapid transit (defined as urban rail) and commuter rail were respectively built across American cities. As a little background tidbit, Kansas City currently lacks both and is in the process of exploring which fixed-rail mode might best serve the city first (you can throw in the possiblity of a downtown streetcar as well). In fact, Jackson County executive Mike Sanders recently proposed for a regionwide commuter rail system in lieu of long-time efforts to get started first on light rail. The table does incorrectly pinpoint 2003 as Sounder Commuter Rail’s inaugural run (as the Seattle-Tacoma southern run began April 2000), but for the sake of the argument, there’s no denying that commuter rail came far before Link Light Rail in Seattle.
What’s the difference?
This brings up a very interesting question in comparing how commuter rail is used versus conventional rapid transit. In places like Tokyo, Japan, there is such a high degree of homogeneity with rail that no one even distinguishes between commuter lines (i.e., JR East Yamanote Line) and typical subway lines (Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line). As rail growth creeps along in the United States, this same process is happening here. Despite this, we can still generally sort out which modes serve so-and-so populace, etc.
Conventionally, rapid transit is generally defined as a rail system (heavy or light rail, depending on the city context) that mainly serves intracity neighborhoods and the urban core of the metropolitan area. These systems provide more frequent service and operate longer hours. Commuter rail generally refers to a regional system serving metropolitan suburbs and the city core. These systems tend to provide higher-capacity service primarily during peak commuting hours (hence the name) on a less frequent basis.
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October 7, 2009
Northwest Hub has a fantastic short tidbit about reclaming old junked alleyways and turning them into nice walkable pedestrian spaces. As noted in the article, the city removed around 700 dumpsters from the downtown core back during springtime. Alley renewal has been something on my mind for quite some time, and I think its successes are highly evident in cities already blessed with strong pedestrian friendliness. For a city like San Francisco, alley utilization is not just a tool for land use, but also one in the means for cultural preservation. Its alleyways in the Chinatown district are now popular corridors for tourists, visitors, and residents alike. To mention my post about San Francisco and Hong Kong, these alleys bear a striking resemblance to the Hutong streets in Beijing, China.
I had the opportunity to visit one of the Hutong alleys in early 2008 and I was remarkably impressed by the positive activity within the narrow streets lined by street vendors, small shops, and tea houses. We Seattleites often clamor for a kind of evening communal hangout (family friendly, bars and clubs aside) and like to point to the success of night markets in other areas of the world. The utilization of certain alleys within Downtown and Chinatown-International District could very well be spots for edifying nighttime activity, whether they be street performers or vendors selling squid. What we don’t want are the drug deals, prositution rendezvous, and fights that have plagued Seattle alleyways. It’s one step to make an alley not too scary to walk through, but it’s another to make them places of walkability, gathering, and social content.
October 3, 2009
"Hongcouver" in Richmond, BC, from Wikimedia
After a lengthy delay, I’ve returned to my short ‘Immigrant Neighborhood’ series regarding ethnic enclaves in North America, how they come to be, and the orientation of growth. My first post in the series focused on urban enclaves, historical districts existing largely within North American city cores, and their preservation. While Chinatowns typically epitomize the central cornerstone of a historical ethnic enclave, North America has witnessed an influx of new immigrant-oriented neighborhoods in traditional suburbs. In the United States, Southern and Central California have bore the greatest witness to this migration. Throughout the breadth of this post, I will mainly refer to the San Gabriel Valley in California and the Greater Vancouver Area in British Columbia, two areas often cited with large Asian populations.
Origins: Social and Demographic Shifts
The suburban ethnic enclave phenomenon can somewhat be attributed to shifts in social and demographic characteristics and habits, in both Asian and other ethnicities. When describing the “new Chinatown”, we can look at Monterey Park in the San Gabriel Valley as an origin for one of the burgeoning Chinese communities in the region. Susie Ling, a professor of Asian American Studies at Pasadena City College, describes the decades of Chinese immigrant history in the Valley prior to this explosive growth. While there is quite a bit of background history of the Chinese community in the earlier half of the 20th century, we can better pinpoint the 1970s as a period when immigrant growth truly burgeoned to become the white-collar ethnic culture it is today. For the purposes of defining what constitutes a suburban enclave, we will apologetically ignore the first half of the 20th century in this context.
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