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| | Guest Editor - Donald Fels |
As things get made, bought, sold, and moved around, so do the ideas that attach themselves to the stuff of our lives. Port cities have always been places that import and export ideas—like rats, ideas stowaway in the holds of ships. Some cities have a long history of production and culture of ideas themselves. Other places, Seattle among them, began life trading in goods and materials. People here might have been open to new ideas, but the business of business wasn’t ideas, it was logs, fish, woolen jackets, and airplanes. Things have changed over the past 150 years and today Seattle employs thousands in the knowledge sector. There is big business here in the exchange of formulas, images and ideas. Retailers are selling goods wrapped in ideas. Local giants REI, Starbucks, and Microsoft all offer us lifestyles: ideas about being in the world.
As an artist who makes ‘public’ work, I am by desire and necessity out on the street pushing the exchange of ideas. Invited to be a guest editor of ARCADE, I thought it would be interesting to investigate ways that ideas surface in the city. I asked some people I respect to consider ideas in cities, and this issue is the result. J.I. Kleinberg begins by considering the city as a place of pure idea: she imagines cities in detail, but they are places she has never seen. Lee Schipper looks at an updated old idea for public transport. Having worked with transportation systems worldwide he well understands that buses are large vehicles, not figments of the imagination. He has concluded that the success of an urban transport system is dependent on its willingness to build on ideas that work.
Patricia Tusa looks at an ancient building form, the arcade, a popular urban amenity around the world but not here. The arcade came into being to provide protection for people and their exchange of ideas, and she wonders why in a rainy place like Seattle we haven’t incorporated the arcade in our neighborhoods. Ron Sher is the founder of Third Place Books, establishments where people feel free to interact and exchange ideas with friends and strangers. He examines the ingredients that support such an open environment. Most of all, he says, people need to feel safe. Anthropologist Setha Low has spent time in several of the gated (and ‘faux gated’) communities that are being built increasingly along the West Coast. She has found that safety also motivates people to move to these communities. But she reports that living there increases fear of others.
Benjamin Thelonious Fels brings us the work of Neapolitan photographer Mimmo Jodice, who for the past 50 years has cultivated a complex relationship with his native city. Naples’ portraitist, his idea of his city has come to represent it. The city’s forms have become his. As Italy’s foremost photographer he has carried the idea of his city out into the world; there have been over 30 monographs devoted to his photographs. People see his work and think of Naples.
Barbara Goldstein and Lisa Richmond look at ARTS UP, an experimental program that treats Seattle as a laboratory. Participating artists are engaging communities through projects that may or may not involve the built environment. Remarkably free of physical and commercial constraints, and building on relationships, the art is able to function as a conduit of energy and fresh ideas.
As a city matures, it circles back on itself, adding layers and richness. Seattle began as a center of resource extraction. And we are still harvesting ideas, not nurturing them. The city’s greatest resource now is undoubtedly its mix of people and their creative energies. For the city to truly benefit from the confluence of ideas that people bring to their city, there have to be places, spaces, and opportunities other than those offered by businesses, where ideas can be exchanged. Seattle needs to address, as a city, how it can foster the culture of ideas. The word idea comes from the same root as the word to see. In nineteenth century Seattle, looking had no more status or currency than thinking. Today views are valued, cherished, even occasionally protected. We need to get to a similar place with ideas.
Seattle may be ready for more active engagement with its intellectuals. With support from Seattle City Councilor Nick Licata, I am organizing a forum of thinkers as ‘idea incubators’ to address city issues. Participants will bring their facility in creative thinking to bear on specific urban problems. The forum will provide a venue for informed yet idiosyncratic knowledge and experience, in the hopes that new approaches, novel points of view and useful ideas will be let loose on the city.
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Donald Fels is a visual artist. Current projects include working with billboard painters in India and cancer researchers in Los Angeles, wiyh weather instruments at the new Ballard Library, semaphores signaling Richard Hugo’s poetry for the Duwamish Waterway, and a hillclimb with an orchard and ‘periscope tree’ for South Seattle. He has just completed Water’s Edge, a book about his experience at the decommissioned steel plant at Bagnoli, Italy, pictured above. |
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