Cohousing-L Mailing List: How to Build an Urban Village

[J . Massengale (J.Massengale]

I got the title of City Comforts slightly wrong. Here's a review that was
posted on Design-l and Urban-l:


"City Comforts: How To Build An Urban Village" By David Sucher
Seattle, Washington, 1995; 176 pp; $18.00 + $3.00 S&H,  Paper.


For those of us addicted to city ambulation, to mind- jogging and
chevy-cruising and dog-sniffing and catwalking in diurnal treasure hunt for
novelties and arcana of simple pleasures, David Sucher has written a
cartographic jewel in his new "City Comforts: How to Build An Urban
Village."


Mr. Sucher, one-time member of the Seattle Planning Commission, writes,
"This book is an attempt to refocus our public policy discussion from
abstract generalities, colored maps and grandiose projects to the details
that create our daily experience. It is about looking at and speaking about
our immediate enivronment. ... the book shows examples of small things --
city comforts -- that makes urban life pleasant: places where people can
meet, methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbors, art that
infuses personality into locations and makes them into places."


Mr. Sucher has compiled for us, in a handheld-ROM, a bounteous lode of tips
and nods for looking at the built environment and fostering our own good
sense and sensibility about what is good and bad -- along with, should that
be our bent, gentle suggestions on how improvements may bloom under our
loving care.


There follows hundreds of poignant examples in photographic and textual
form of precisely what we might look for in our cities -- neighborhoods and
parks and streets and back alleys and shopping strips, what to make of our
observations, and what we could offer if we don't like what we see and
touch and smell and, yes, fall asleep upon. Smart man, to remind us at his
bookend of the feral pleasure in a safe nap in a park (reading his book)
and a corporeal renaissance wakeup to bright sky and leafy trees overhead.


There is an astonishing range of urban experiences sketched:


Commercial allures for customer come-in and buy;

Neighborhood safety and security measures, well blended;

Urbane luminescences and auralities, built and god- given;

Land-costuming, by construction and vegetation;

The creation of great and small passions and delights;

Non-destructive (to self and others) activities for kids;

Deft tools of information by signage and architecture;

Unoffensive public accommodations for base relief;

Balm for property owners feeling abused by demagogues;

Enlightened rejuvenation or camouflage of ugly illegitimacies and
porkbarrel nefaria too useful to demolish (like parking garages, sanitary
dumps, vain architectural monstrosities).


Professionals on a card-punching trajectory of ambition will see nothing
here to frighten them -- that they may be on the wrong arc.


For this is a book for those who are disappointed with top- down design and
planning, with career-mongering and evasive political machinations. But it
is disguised so artfully that the self-deafened and -blinded and
-desensitized egos will never perceive its quake rumbling to undermine
their launch pads -- its advocacy of ground shifting of environmental
responsibility from the over-trained, over- controlling, over-burdened
designers and planners to the citizens who have too long suffered their
conceits.


This admirable work, expanding the ground-shifting of Jane Jacobs, will
give comfort to those who wish to get on with making the cities they want
while the ensconced bright talents evanesce in stupor.


Read it while enjoying the pleasure of long perambulations -- and naps
under greenleaves sweetdreaming of beautiful environments. Crafting
self-confabulated virtual reality.


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"City Comforts", $18.00, + $3.00 S&H, ISBN 0-9642680-0-0, is available from:

City Comforts Press
5605 Keystone Place North
Seattle, Washington 98103

e-mail address: comfort101 [at] aol.com
1-800-942-CITY


Review by John Young, Architect
jya [at] pipeline.com