A great example of what makes a place great

Last night, I was in the Dupont Circle area for a meeting, and afterwards I went to scavenge a copy of the Dupont Current, because something I wrote is supposed to run as a "viewpoint"--maybe in today's paper? So I happened upon a band playing away, by the Starbucks. Because I have a problem figuring out how to take good night shots with my camera, my shots just weren't that great.
Jazz playing at Dupont Circle, photo via DCist.

It was pretty amazing, and I was thinking that they were better than the band I saw at Bourbon and Canal Streets a couple weeks ago, and that band wasn't bad either... Occasionally a black church jazz band plays in the area, but I never saw such a crowd as I did last night. Fortunately, I wasn't the only urbanist in the vicinity.

From Steve Pinkus:

Walking through Dupont Circle last night around 10 PM, I stumbled upon this great example of spontaneous place making ….. a large New Orleans-style band with a large and participating audience. It's spontaneous gatherings like this that make me, and many others, love cities and urban life. Only when you have mixed use, human scale, lots of pedestrians, and calmed traffic can you have true urban street life. Tysons Corner it isn't!

This makes me think that perhaps there are other uses for our streets and public spaces than just moving traffic and am frankly surprised the police or neighbors didn't have this shut down.

The photos don't fully capture how many people were in the audience, more than 100 people easy, on the road apron, on the sidewalks on both sides of Connecticut Avenue...

It was truly a magical moment ... especially the interaction between the band players and the audience to the point where the two blurred into a true mix of race, ethnicity, and class. That's what properly designed urban spaces are supposed to do .... comfortably mix people of all social backgrounds. I was reminded of Schrag's take on the Great Society Subway.

It's very difficult to have this sort of spontaneous interaction in car-dominated environments and I think the isolation of the car leads to segregation and a sense of automony from the public realm. I think this explains why larger, denser cities and densifying inner suburbs tend to vote Democratic while low density, car dominated areas tend to lean Republican..

(While I try not to comment too much about Democrats vs. Republicans, preferring to focus on the tension between "the exchange value of place" and "the use value of place," in part this comes down to a difference in preference between connectedness and individualism-selfishness-narcissism, although we have plenty of that in urban areas...)

Check out this article, "Pride of Place: Fred Kent and the Project for Public Spaces," about PPS and Fred Kent, where Fred talks about "layering" of events and happenings as a fundamental aspect of making great places. From the article:

Kent, Madden and their colleagues have spent the years since they formed the Project for Public Spaces in 1975 elaborating on this basic notion. They have plenty of suggestions for creating the sort of clutter on a street that people like, for the way buildings ought to behave--don't create blank walls, don't confront pedestrians with theheating and air conditioning infrastructure, don't lard a block with curb cuts--and for layering attractions that gather people in. "If you have a children's reading room inside and a playground outside," says Kent, "then you put a coffee shop, a Laundromat and a bus stop right there, you will create the busiest spot in your community."

For me, Dupont Circle is about the best park space that we have in DC. Now all we need to do is take back the inner circle road and make it over into more park for the Circle.
Dupont Circle Street Recital and Fundraiser, photo by Keith Stanley.

Dupont Circle photo by Daquella Manera.

Index Keywords: placemaking