Seattle Street Dodgeball

Claire Mueller and Tim Lehman

Seattle Street Dodgeball formed in mid to late 2007 in Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park. The Dodgeballers used one of the two tennis courts available in the park, and brought their own balls to play twice a week. Around the same time, Seattle Bike Polo began meeting in the same place, and tennis players began complaining to the Parks Department that the courts were being destroyed and tennis players could no longer use them. The Dodgeball Crew moved for a short time to a local community center, but quickly realized that the vibrant spirit of dodgeball came from the eclectic group of ever changing people and the convienence of Cal Anderson Park. Despite being told by the Parks Department that they were not allowed to play in the tennis courts and orders from the Seattle Police Department that any dodgeball activities seen by officers must be immediately stopped, the games continued twice a week for 2 more years.

The Seattle Street Dodgeball group became friends with the local police, encouraged kids to play dodgeball instead of drinking or drugs, and they provided a welcoming space to meet neighbors and friends for free on Capitol Hill. They appeared before the Parks Department and led a highly successful campaign to provide a space for dodgeball in Cal Anderson Park. After years of conflict with tennis players, just last year the city designated one of the Cal Anderson tennis courts a Seattle Dodgeball Court. Now, on Wednesdays, Sundays, and occasionally other days too, Dodgeball meets attracting hundreds of people in Cal Anderson Park.

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WINTER NIGHT

Cayce James & Betsy Anderson

We chose to record Seattle’s “DIY” urban qualities at night in order to explore aspects of the city environment that are less visible in daylight. DIY Urbanism, as we perceive it, is the unconscious, collective influence of people over their environment, in contrast to individual, calculated manipulations of space.

Everyday Urbanists argue that lived experience—“a work of life” (Raymond Ledrut)—is of primary importance in the design of cities, and that such living, spontaneous movements must be privileged over the city’s physical form. When light bathes the city during the day, space and information are overexposed. At night, on the other hand, the spatial form of the city is subjugated to experience, to a highly distilled, shifting balance between stillness and action. Certain areas are hubs of activity, intensified by their proximity to the silent and deserted streets that surround them. Our photographs investigate the juxtapositions that occur only at night, focusing on the dynamic interplay between people, light, and the physical environment.

Here everything becomes an artistic medium for human presence, resulting in temporal imagery such as textured footprints on snow or the paintings made by traffic lights reflecting on wet pavement. We sought to exploit these facets of DIY urbanism in a catalog of “tactical” expressions, to borrow the term of Michel de Certeau. These instants were captured between 7 and 10 pm on Capitol Hill, in Fremont, and on the UW campus. In each case we were struck by the strength of the connection between the emotional and social character of the night and its visual expression.

Here are our locations: