On the Way Home
The reading from Margaret Crawford “Everyday Urbanism” got my attention. She quoted Raymond Ledrut:
“… The true issue is not to make beautiful cities or well-managed cities, it is to make a work of life. The rest is a by-product.”
In our everyday life, we go to work, come home, run errands, occasionally shopping, going out for coffee, take a hike, … I am imagining my life right now as a student at Clemson. Every time I need to do anything on this list, I need to hop in my car a drive around to multiple locations. More often than not, the places I need to go are on the opposite direction from each other. Clemson as a city (perhaps many cities in the United States) makes it quite inconvenient and inefficient in doing what we call as everyday life activities.
The image above is a map of one of the floor inside the Tokyo train station. Almost all of the major train stations in Japan organized in the same way. The train station is not just a place where people come to catch a train to go from point A to point B. It is like a compact city in a way. It is where people can grab groceries, home appliances, etc. or students can grab school supplies on the way home. All they need to do is get off at a station on the line, get what they need, and hop back onto the train to go home. Everything one needs to support their daily activities can all take place in a short period of time and on the direction they already headed toward. Comparing to how our cities in the United States are organized, I would not have to drive from east to west and then from south to north to get something on the way home.
How does the architecture evolve if the urban design is of low or no quality?
Tuyen,
ReplyDeleteI love the comment about low or no quality because it's so true.
Cities in America, well most of them, are not set up for ease of quality of life the way in which you described Tokyo. It is painful.
I have experienced this first hand, growing up in Charleston.
Sure, it has grown into itself, and needs to accommodate different thoughts and change, but it is set up terribly for urbanism.
So the question then becomes, how do we provide even low quality urbanism in a place like Charleston.
It is a hard question that we posed. Infrastructure of a location does not happen overnight. It also might be fair to say that it is a headache to fix what is already broken. But to this thought, with the increasing of cities’s density, perhaps we could build something of the same way like Tokyo Station but not a train or subway station. What if all the shops, restaurants, markets, etc. are within a housing complex?! Just a thought.
DeleteTuyen, I completely agree with you. It was hard for me coming to South Carolina from a city like Chicago where it is quite similar to the example from Japan you have above! They have the metro in Chicago and this can take you from any side of the city to the other, as well as New York has this too!
ReplyDeleteI think again the question is how do we implement this type of urbanism into smaller cities like Clemson?
Tuyen,
ReplyDeleteAs somebody who grew up in the "boonies", as we call it, I can attest to the inconvenience of rural errand running on a personal level. In all honesty the only real experience I've had with the convenience of urban density is on road trips through places where I didn't even stay very long. I love the idea of being able to just grab groceries on my walk back home from work, but also recognize that notion is only really possible in places like Tokyo and other heavily populated areas. Out in the country, the small towns of America formed around farms where people used to just live off the land for the most part. They are far more spread out so I'm not sure how we can develop an urban layout as efficient as someplace such as Tokyo.
Tuyen, I completely agree with you and love the point you are making. I believe a lot of it has to do with how rural or urban the place in which you find yourself is. In cities you will always have a lot more accessibility to resources since everything is more condensed while in rural areas you might need to drive up to even 30 minutes to get to the nearest grocery store. I believe this has to do with a life style choice but i think it is a great point you make and I wonder if there is a way in which we can have both?
ReplyDelete