September 2008

In a previous exercise, I focused on rhythms — patterns that happen in time.

We are also surrounded by patterns that happen in space, and we experience these patterns as rhythms when we move through space. When we travel in cities, for example, that experience is shaped by three factors: the roads and buildings on the land, the speed we travel, and how our speed changes.

The roadways and architecture are like the grooves on a record: what music would a city play if a stylus was dragged through it?

(Note to younger readers: I’m talking about phonograph records — look it up!)

Here in downtown Portland, the city blocks are relatively small: 200 feet by 200 feet. To visitors from a city with blocks twice the size, walking in Portland might feel twice as “fast” even if they were walking at their normal pace. I grew up in the suburbs, with a hodgepodge of grid and amorphous street designs, and to me, Portland feels metronomic by comparison.

Our pace affects our perception, too: is the record spinning at 78, 45 or 33 and 1/3? I usually walk, experiencing the city as an LP. When I’m on a bike or driving, especially if there’s not much traffic, it’s more like a single.

Different details emerge from the landscape at different speeds, just as different sounds become easier or harder to identify when playing a record at different speeds.

On foot, I notice individual faces, the little spaces that stay wet days after it rains, and the undulations in the asphalt of the bus lanes.

In a car, we usually zip right through such details. We might feel the undulations slightly, get a general sense of how wet or dry the city is, and perceive people moving in flocks around us. But our attention is both farther ahead, and farther behind us. We experience more in the same amount of time, and so we have less attention to direct towards any one patch of ground or building or face.

In crowded urban places, our proximity to one another, and our need to avoid collisions, keeps us continually adjusting our speed, and this too affects our perception of space.

I’ve noticed that on 4th Avenue in downtown Portland, I’m often able to walk at a fairly steady speed and hit every green light. This city is made for foot traffic, or at least the lights are calibrated that way.

Driving the same street, even after rush hour, it’s usually a choice between coasting down hill at eight to ten miles an hour, or constantly accelerating to twenty or twenty-five, then stopping a minute or two at the next red light. This start/stop effect is almost like a hip-hop DJ scratching a record during a transition: the underlying music is recognizable, but it’s not all that easy to settle into a groove until the record starts spinning again.

Questions

• What is the distance between streets and buildings in your neighborhood? Is it consistent?
• How many homes or stores or parking lots are there in each block? Are there even discernible blocks?
• How is it different from other places you’ve lived?
• And how does your speed affect your perception of the patterns and of place?
• How do other people affect your speed?

Exercises

1.

Move around your neighborhood in at least two modes of transportation. Note any patterns you experience, and the ebb and flow required for navigation.

If you walk at a comfortable pace, do you tend to hit the green lights, or do you find yourself rushing across the street as the light turns red? Do you find yourself yielding to traffic, or vice versa, or is traffic not an issue?

What do you experience at slower speeds, but not faster speeds?

2.

Look at your neighborhood on Google Maps. How do your perceptions on the ground compare to the view from above?

Some patterns are so large that they are difficult to experience by moving through them. How does your neighborhood look at different scales? What patterns can you see that weren’t obvious on the ground?

3.

Also in Google Maps, take a look at a few neighborhoods nearby, or in a city you might be visiting soon.

Select one that looks interesting from a few thousand feet up. Go to that neighborhood and travel through it using two modes of transportation, reviewing the questions and your thoughts from the first exercise. Does the experience differ in a significant way from your own neighborhood?

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