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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Urban Diary: Places of Color

By Caleb Shih & Ben Morgen

The blandness of the urban cityscape seems to be an epidemic running through modern city design. Where once proud neighborhoods stood, never ending overlap of grey pavement and run down commerce can be found fight to encroach. Conformity and unconsciousness has lead to a disconnected citizen body, where community is not felt and responsibility is not taken. However In the University District one of Seattle’s busiest neighborhoods community members have taken a stand to characterize and personalize their urban space implementing the simple notion of color and grandeur to scream out against the dull gray landscape. In locations around the neighborhood such as on University and 41^st or 15^th and 8^th, artists have gifted the community with gigantic murals of color. These statements are not only beautifully striking in their artistic presence, but have become landmarks giving the University District beautiful places of interests and reorganization. With a personality and places of reference the University District does not have to be a place know for weary student zombies march to lectures or bums asking for money, but a peaceful place of color and creation, where the artistic and concerned citizen is just a strong as the academic community.

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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:

DIY Diary: Intersections of Community, Art & Culture

By: Nancy Chan & Cami Culbertson

In 1996 co-founders Mark Lakeman, Eva Rose Miller, and Charla Chamberlain gave birth to Portland’s City Repair Project, a grass roots movement towards bringing the “public” back to public streets.  Over the years numerous intersections have been transformed throughout Portland by the average individual joining forces with others within the community to create street murals, community bulletin boards, mini-cafes, etc.  Inspired, in 2005 Seattle citizens began to engage in activating their own neighborhood streetscapes by turning ordinary intersections into brightly painted gathering spaces.

The reclamation of public space, known as Intersection Repair strives to promote localization of culture, economy, and decision-making.  Furthermore, this act of place making cultivates the construction of safe, strong, and welcoming communities, as well as the creation of meaningful spaces that will serve the specific needs of each individual neighborhood.

Traditionally, neighbors within communities keep to themselves, content within the confines of their property lines, but Intersection Repair fosters the development of community cooperation and interaction. Neighbors get to know one another as they work side-by-side to create a unique expression of the community.  The physical act of transforming these streets is just as important as the finished project – the journey is just as important as the arrival.  For without the support of the community such projects do not exist. Some paintings have not survived the years [i.e. Squire Park in the Central District] due to a lack of citizen commitment and/or new community dynamics. 

Questions arise regarding the actual safety of Intersection Repair murals in terms of distractions for drivers, but for the majority this movement has empowered citizens to take ownership of their communities, transforming ideals regarding the street and how it can be used.  Communities across the United States have adopted City Repair methods to infuse life and human connectivity back into communities.  After all, the city is for the people - citizens should claim it and morph it, not accept it.

           

Known Locations:

N 80^th St & Stone Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103

N 41^st St & Interlake Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103

N 49th St & Burke Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103

NW 60^th St & 11^th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107
E Marion & 20th Ave E

Maple Leaf Intersection Repair Proposed at NE 96^th St & 12 Ave NE

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Resources:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003253218_wallingford11m.html
http://daily.sightline.org/2011/11/28/coloring-inside-the-lanes/
http://seattle.cityrepair.info/2010/09/

Snowmen as Installation Art

Snow-Creatures as Temporary Installation Art

By Arthur Freeman and Jordan Lewis

Location: Green Lake, University of Washington, Greek Row (UW).

Many Seattle residents have a love-hate relationship with snow in the city. While its presence generally gets many people excited, Seattle has been known to virtually shut down with small amount of snowfall -- causing disruption in people’s travel plans and daily routines. Jokingly, many UW students refer to this week’s snow-forecast as a potential “snow-pocalypse”.

This disruption of typical life in the city also leads to new uses of urban spaces as people take to the streets and sidewalks and parks with sleds, skis and snowshoes. We observed that streets are informally repurposed during snowstorms -- pedestrians reclaiming these public spaces which are typically reserved for vehicular travel for recreation purposes. We were interested in looking specifically at snowmen and ‘snow-creatures’ as a temporary art installations in the city that have the ability to foster community interaction. What are the types of snow-creatures being made, where do they occur most frequently, and do the types of artistic (or non-artistic) expression vary in different locales? The photos show some of the artistic expressions we found around campus and Greenlake. Snow was used Temporary art -- using materials on hand. Sticks, rocks, and sometimes edible items were placed to make an artistic statement.









http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=206597081587897719603.0004b5c0a3c16be09cedb&hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=m&vpsrc=6&ll=47.624215,-122.344437&spn=0.138838,0.205994&z=11&source=embed

Reading the Narratives In Between Spaces

DIY Urbanism: A Definition

The intentional and artful layering of physical, colorful objects on existing urban infrastructure. The goal, to demarcate a specific space as a significant place, to invite consciousness to the place and its surrounding context; to entice onlookers to peel away the visual and colorful layers of texture in order to reveal and interpret the story rooting that place in the urban environment.

Site: "In Memory of Robby"

Location:
Intersection of University Way (The Ave) and Campus Parkway

Time of observations:
January 10^th, 2012, 9:00am

Surrounding context of site:
Two major roads University Way and Campus Parkway. Heavy amounts of cars, buses, university students, pedestrians, bicyclists; all navigating these roads and intersection at a fast speed.

Objects and materials used in site area

-flowers

-crosses with hand written notes and messages

-origami cranes

-string

-fabric

-bicycle regalia

-t-shirts

-beer cans

-Jimmy John sandwich bags

The story:
September 10^th, 2011, Robert Storm Townsend, a beloved and vibrant bicyclist, worker at Jimmy John's Sandwich Shop and member of the local bike community was hit by an oncoming car in this intersection. Five months ago, his friends and members of the local bike community erected this memorial in his honor. By pure luck when documenting this site, we met Alex, a dear friend of Robby. Alex (seen in the last photo of the slideshow) visits this site and memorial everyday, to bring Robby breakfast. “The most important meal of the day,” shares Alex, he brings a donut for himself and for Robby and sits by the memorial looking into the traffic, reflecting on his dear friend. Alex and his friends plan to keep adding to Robby’s memorial with flowers and by adding permanent lockers and storage space with tools so that people can come to this place to remember Robby.

Robby’s memorial is a moving example of DIY urbanism by the local bike community that illustrates how the stories in a place are preserved and brought to life through objects and their form. From a distance, the memorial is easily noticeable through the large objects and colors layered on top of each other, but when you look closely, you can see the details that tell this particular story.

By: Malda Takieddine and Angelica Rockquemore