Field Notes

Photo by Jay Maude

“This city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the coursers of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightening rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

~Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities ~ (tr. William Weaver) ~ San Diego : Harcourt Brace, 1974 / pg 44

Via the quotation Blog:  The Infinite Conversation

My city Seattle began in 1851 with the landing of the Denny Party at what is now called Alki  Point, at the time (1851) it was named Prairie Point  (by the Indians in their language sbaqWabaqs).  There was a large population of indigenous people living around Puget Sound,  the Indians of the Seattle area were made up generally of three groups, the Duwamish, the Shilshole  and the Lakes people. The land and water was bountiful and the people here prosperous by their standards till Europeans and Americans from the East arrived and the quick decline started. The worst influence of course was disease. During the 1770s, smallpox (variola major) eradicates at least 30 percent of the native population on the Northwest coast of North America, including numerous members of Puget Sound tribes.

In 1851 the first settlement was begun here in Seattle, by the Denny Party. Arthur  Denny describes the  arrival of the Denny Parties thus in his journal:

Soon after we landed and begun to clearing the ground for our buildings they commenced to congregate, and continued coming until we had  over a thousand in our midst, and most of them remained all winter. Some of them built their houses very near to ours, even on ground we had cleared, and although they seemed very friendly toward us we did not feel safe in objecting to their building near to us for fear of offending them.

– from Arthur Denny Pioneer Days on Puget Sound

The mythic image of the birth of Seattle is a small group of white settlers in a cold foreboding land with a sprinkling of native people here and there. This seems to be wrong, there was a large community of indigenous people in the Puget Sound surrounds.  That would quickly change as more and more settlers arrived. Two worlds were in collision and the indigenous was being replaced by the settlers.

It seems like an important part of our local history is lost and obscured by myths that support the new regime, to understand our community now we need to know what was here before and what we replaced.

From Where we live Now

The city’s richness cannot be gleaned from any critical distance, but needs a body drawn through it, like some kind of wrecking ball, to crack open it’s meanings. Insight sparks from this collision, or it adheres  to it, like opium scraped from the legs of naked children set running through poppy fields.

- Matthew Stadler

I have been doing a lot of thinking  about Where We Live Now. The places between city and country, inner cities, suburban landscapes there are many versions of “here”, the classic city of our imagination is really that an imaginary place. No one can close their eyes and visualize their city or town with out seeing the “downtown”, the classic city center around which most cities radiate, but these city centers are just a very small part of the city we live in.

There are numerous ideologies and interest groups vying for  control of the future of where we live now, the developers, the speculators, businesses such as Wal-Mart, Costco, Home Depot, ecologists, neighborhood activist, governments. Each of these see where we live now differently, if where we live now is to succeed and to be a viable community we need to synthesize the disparate visions and work together. Community implies cooperation and harmony, finding ways to bring the different visions together is a great challenge, our politicians don’t seem up to the task.  We need new modes, new eyes, and a new appreciation of where we live now. The beauty and aesthetics of the in between places, the awareness of what is close, our neighbors, businesses, families, wild life, all these need consideration.

Planning is necessary,  local government is good at designing building codes, street safety and some transportation planning but where we live now transcends boundaries, the in-between places are seldom planned well and no group or government is taking responsibility for the WHOLE.

Sources:

 Where We Live Now: an annotated reader edited by Matthew Stadler

 Suddenly.Org

(image via: animatedGIF)

“Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night” by On Sylvain Chauveau and Steven Hess filtered through the mind of Helge Sten (Deathprod).

60 minute Sound Experiment
Found via: TYPE