One major harbinger of a post-pandemic swing to normal in downtown Seattle is Amazon’s much-heralded return to the office this week, which I like to call the “Amazon Great Return.”
In Seattle, which has one of the slowest rates of workers returning to the office, hopes are high. “I’m very pleased that employers like Amazon recently announced and recognize that coming back to work downtown is a great thing,” Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said in his recent State of the City address.
Expectations resound in Seattle, Amazon’s backyard, where city leaders are pleading companies to bring workers back to the office, with the consequential effects on business and street vitality. Couple that with a general sense of urban malaise: increased homelessness, crime, and drug use.
Harrell has been big on new initiatives, including expanding public safety patrols, launching new drug intervention initiatives, use of vacant storefronts for “pop-up” artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors, and increased street-closures for pedestrian activity, ranging from allowances for “sip n’ stroll” walkability, curbside music, and even pickleball.
No one wants more of what has become emblematic in the media: the recent closure of a flagship Whole Foods store in San Francisco in the wake of a concern for staff safety based on surrounding street conditions.
As the Amazon (and other) “Great Returns” unfold, however, it’s important to dig deeper.
The trick will be to assess the ideals that the quick fixes are meant to guarantee and restore, which are, essentially, the first principles of cities. These principles include time-immemorial concepts: safety, the basic connectors between people and where they work, the importance of hubs of culture and human interaction, and the co-creation necessary to keep these Great Returns alive.
Presuming that dysfunction accelerated and then reigned during the pandemic, what should be the ideal larger goals for cities moving forward during the season of Great Returns? Beyond renewed downtown programming, stadium-filling events, and business receipts, how will we find the secret sauce of compatibility that will resound in the inherent context, culture and character of an urban settlement?
Will the Amazon help reinvigorate the first-floor foot-flow for surrounding restaurants and businesses in the sustained fashion followed by tech-building design decisions worldwide (e.g. the local businesses that line Budge Row, London’s oldest street, that passes under Bloomberg’s European headquarters building in London.)?
I offer five overarching ideas below — some already addressed by the measures discussed above — and some pitfalls to avoid.
Safe places and spaces make for interaction and income.
The first priority for any city is to ensure that its residents and visitors feel safe and comfortable in its public spaces. This means not only addressing the issues of crime and homelessness, but also creating protected environments that invite people to linger, socialize, and spend money. This should include use of well-established crime-prevention principles of environmental design (“CEPTED,” even in temporary spaces) to facilitate the quality of being friendly or encourage social interaction — by providing amenities such as seating, lighting, landscaping, art, and entertainment. These elements can help create a sense of place and community, as well as generate economic activity and vitality.
Tool focus: Context.
The second principle is to respect and enhance the unique context of each place and to avoid generic and bland approaches. This means understanding its history, culture, geography, ecology, and identity, and designing interventions that complement rather than clash with them. Cities should strive to preserve and celebrate their “urban DNA” — the distinctive features that make them recognizable and memorable.
Typically, this can be done with attention on historic districts and the role they have played in a city’s history, supporting local businesses and artists, promoting cultural diversity and inclusion, and protecting natural resources and ecosystems. In other words, celebrate pedestrian spaces with reference to their histories, and the indigenous peoples involved, and be sure buskers sing and perform with reference to where they are. Harrell’s “pickleball placemaking,” noted above, may fit the bill given the game’s official “Washington state Sport” status, and its roots on nearby Bainbridge Island.
Beyond two dimensions
The third idea is to think beyond the conventional two-dimensional plane of storefronts, streets and sidewalks, and explore the potential of vertical and horizontal dimensions. This means creating more opportunities for people to experience the city from different perspectives and heights, such as rooftops, balconies, bridges, tunnels, stairs, elevators, or even drones. Alternative modes of urban exploration can reveal new aspects of the city’s form and function, as well as inspire creativity and innovation.
Better yet why not make this multi-dimensional reality a programmed participatory process? I’ve long advocated citizen use of various lenses and media, such as photography, sketching, mapping, storytelling, and data visualization to reveal the patterns, preferences, and potentials of urban places. By seeing the better city, we can also identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement and engage in a dialogue with stakeholders and decision-makers.
Hybrid is the city
The fourth notion is to embrace the hybrid nature of cities as “assemblages,” essentially complex systems that combine different elements from different domains. This means acknowledging that cities are not only physical but also digital, social, cultural, economic, and political entities; that they are not only static but also dynamic, adaptive, and evolving entities that change over time.
Institutions — even private businesses — may live on in a different form, because they honor respect for the people involved. I discussed one example in my most recent book: London’s Bobtail Fruit, once a fruit stall in the historic vegetable market, Covent Garden, that transitioned to five brick-and-mortar outlets around the city, and more recently to a web-based delivery business of quality baskets of fruit, and milk.
Bobtail’s success over time is more about an intangible respect for customers and community service (such as the delivery of gifts at holiday time in neighborhoods where its stalls once stood). Significantly, during the pandemic, Bobtail was well-positioned to expand its delivery area, taking on more residential customers while its traditional office clientele worked from home.
In the Bobtail Fruit example, physical space no longer defines the sale process, now warehouse-based in a retrofitted rail-line arch (a reused space in its own right), and subject to a wholesaler who supplies the fruit. But the rail arch could easily be a Seattle downtown storefront, with some onsite commerce inside and a web-based operation in back. In Bobtail’s case, a customer service imperative dating back to Covent Garden days remains key to the business, which has adapted to customer needs in a new form.
Bobtail Fruit’s people-centric approach suggests how to turn angst into action. Adaptation and blending will frame the next steps to something new. But beyond short-term recovery programming, we still need more immersive thought to get there.
A place healing manifesto
The answer will lie in an approach to urban regeneration that considers not only the physical but also the psychological and emotional well-being of people. This means recognizing that places have the power to heal or harm us depending on how they affect our senses, moods, memories, and behaviors. Cities should aim to create places that foster positive emotions such as joy, curiosity, and awe; that stimulate our senses with beauty, variety, and harmony; that evoke meaningful associations with our personal or collective histories; and that encourage healthy habits such as walking, cycling, or even meditating on what, in actuality, is a hybrid and evolutionary place.
Perhaps Great Returns everywhere should focus most on the healing involved an any recovery process. One that sounds abstract and ethereal at first but focuses on communication between stakeholders; clear admission of differences and limitations; acknowledgment of different stories of minority and indigenous populations; new place metrics and renewed volunteerism; and, most importantly an acknowledgment that top-down imposition of form and function is a less-favored approach in today’s democracies.
Great Returns should strive for sustained regeneration and anticipate the synergies of co-creation and empowering the expertise of those affected. Above all, beyond business interests and government, those who will be the actors in this unfolding saga know best the areas where they work and live.
