Oh Seattle!

Oh wow! Seattle is now vying with Portland for my affections!! Public art, pocket parks, third spaces, densification, greenways...it looks great in many places, and feel pretty good too!

These cities share some of the same characteristics but are quite different too. Perhaps Seattle reminds me more of Auckland... and not just because of the Space needle/Sky Tower! There are definitely differences there too. On Friday, for example, we bussed out to Issaquah (across town buses are very similar in many ways - let's not dwell on that!). Milenko Matanovic has created the most wonderful Pomegranate Centre out there where he and his team work to build places, leaders and communities to prepare communities from all over the US (and possibly beyond) for the future. These places are primarily gathering places built on processes of collective creativity, meaningful engagement and powerful collaboration. The process is different in different places but always starts with community visions and views and moves on to amalgamate these with those of professional designers then gets really hands on as all sorts of people get together and build, often meeting and getting to know their neighbours as they do. Here is their Code fo collaboration. Not rocket science maybe, but not always practiced with integrity in my experience either:

There is a huge movement here for bump spaces/ third places/ public gathering places like those cocreated with Milenko and his team. They are often small and sometimes in the most unlikely spots - back alleys, cantilevered off hillsides, pocket parks on small corners. I don't see such things happening in Auckland or NZ, am I under a rock? I think we could really learn from this stuff... it blends place making with community building and operates at the local neighbourhood scale - not designed to service a wider region or deliver regional goals, yet contributing to them all the same (albeit in sometimes unexpected and unplanned ways which is part of the fun :-)) 

It was in this small corner park (above) that I met with Lee Harper later that day (right across town, several taxis and buses later - what was I thinking when I arranged this??!) This little park (something like maybe 12 square metres - but not a square!) was developed with matched funding from the Department of Neighbourhood. It is directly adjacent to the footpath with only 3 benches and a few large rocks in the middle and is beautifully planted in a relatively low maintenance form. While Lee and I talked people detoured off the footpath as they walked past just to go through it, children climbed on and over the rocks and various people took short breaks on one of the benches. It's a bump space for locals and a pause space too. It slows things down a little in what is otherwise quite a busy space of local businesses, traffic and the Phinney Centre. Really nice. 


The Phinney Center (must get local spelling right!) was founded in 1980 by Phinney neighbours and has grown from strength to strength since then. And that's a key thing about much of the Seattle we have been seeing - its very strengths oriented. That's not to say there aren't challenges and issues, but there is a deep sense of organising for better connections (and less red tape) between neighbours and partnership with organisations such as City Hall.

Journeying around the city with Jim Diers on Saturday reinforced this in many many ways -  by working with what is there, repurposing and multipurposing together with others and building new too, things have come about like the  low income housing built above a library in Delridge and an arts centre where artists have apartments upstairs in the same suburb both connected to the local CDC; the many different community gardens serving all sorts of needs (including a recently constructed one on the roof of a carpark as seen above - they are going to plant a tree in the car...); community gathering places - like small ampitheatres in local neigbourhoods and a repurposed mall that is now the home of Third Place Commons; pollinator greenways, pocket parks and a network of skateparks! 

Although Dylan couldn't drop into them on his Penny board the skate parks were probably the highlight for him! That and the Experience Music Project we spent most of Sunday at... but I will let [make!] him tell you about that!! Except to say that I want one in Auckland too... 


Denise :-)