Reading Local Seattle

Downtown Burien is where it is at.

On July 3rd, in the middle of the day, in Burien’s new town hall that has a stairway reminiscent of the speckled stairwells that used to be found at the Central Library built in the 1960s (and torn down to be replaced by the Rem Koolhaas library), a German urban planner named Thomas Sieverts held an open-to-the-public meeting and talk with the Burien City Council. Sieverts had been brought to Seattle as part of Suddenly.org’s translation and publication of Sieverts book, Zwischenstadt, translated as “in-between city” and published as “Where We Live Now.”

The assumption of “Where We Live Now,” and one that seemed lost on Charles Mudede when he reviewed the book in The Stranger, is that the city as an organizing idea, as the vehicle of culture, as a center no longer functions. In fact, the city hardly reflects the reality, as they say, on the ground. One section of Sieverts’s book is titled, “The Distorting Myth of the City.” Stadler begins the annotated reader, “The French historian Fernand Braudel makes the astonishing claim that any city “has to dominate an empire, however, tiny, in order to exist at all,”and astonished, Stadler makes quick work that this concept comes with a number of assumptions that no longer hold. In both Seattle and Portland, for instance, what were in the past the condition of cities — ethnic populations, close proximity of socio-economic groups, and population density are in fact now found in the suburbs.  A visit to Des Moines or Kent in Washington State or Beaverton in Oregon will confirm this fact. Study the demographics to find numbers. Either way this is the case despite the fact that these areas at best only contain shells of ancient downtown cores or retail parodies of Middle-American Main Streets. They are not proper cities. This is as radical and contrarian a point of view about the urban and suburban divide.

The excerpt of Sieverts book is short, about 80 pages and clear and thankfully free of jargon.  He provides a quick history of cities. He talks about specifics such as lot size, the amount of land given over to transportation (in the form of freeways), about the effects of communication. The city, he proves, has dissolved, and yet community remains.

One wonders then, that if this thesis or evidence is misread by a writer such as Charles Mudede, what will Burien’s City Council make of it? After they have rebuilt their downtown in order to establish Burien as a city of consequence, as a real place.

The city council talked mostly about their plans to annex the area north of the city and make it part of the city of Burien. They talked about assimilating ethnic populations who they felt were not in attendance at the meeting and should be represented. They talked about strategies of getting people out of their cars and on foot. To address culture, they talked about artist lofts. They spent time trading stories about what it meant to be a citizen of Burien. They talked about expanding the existing development in order to complete their transformation of downtown Burien into a model city.

At no point did Sieverts or Matthew Stadler become irritable or show any signs of not talking gently to the City Council who clearly had not read the book, had not been listening very closely, who were at loss when Sieverts said they needed to discover the beauty of their existing sprawl. They were intent on building a model city that would match the urban myth that has already dissolved.

An administrator at the SOS Arts group (South-of-Seattle) mentioned that artist who live in Burien don’t really think of the Burien itself but rather that they live in an area and associate with people who have similar interests.  The council and the mayor were dismissive of anything outside of the boundaries of Burien.

However, Burien is occupied by groups and visited by people that do not recognize the city of Burien as a viable entity. Burien is more of a node with strong connections to Renton, South Center, Highline, White Center, Des Moines, Federal Way, Kent, and Auburn. Sieverts book talks a great deal about how these multiple centers work together to form a civic fabric.  Form a practical nature civic leaders need to think in terms of zip codes, but even corporations are slowly losing their zip-code centric point of view as they begin to understand people as occupying both physical space and virtual space.

I admired, though how patiently and charminlgy Suddenly.org had brought before the civic leaders of Burien the idea of Where We Now. Despite my own pessimism, despite the rubble of Burien’s old downtown surrounding City Hall, it seemed a hopeful thing that Burien would sit down and talk and think about these things.

Author: Matt Briggs

Matt Briggs is the author of five books, including Shoot the Buffalo, a novel published by Clear Cut Press and winner of a 2006 American Book Award. His second novel, The Strong Man, will be released on March 1st 2010. Recent work has appeared in Spork, First Intensity, Seattle Magazine, and The Clackamas Literary Review.

Matt Briggs has written 78 articles for us.