Facets of Urban Life: Urban Form: A Sea of Chaos, a Mosiac of our Imagination...

“This City now doth, like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the feils, and unto the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.”

William Wordsworth in his 1802 sonnet, “Composed upon the Westminster Bridge” wrote these words, echoing what he saw when he looked upon London and the River Thames. Can the same be said about our city of Port of Spain?

(i) This is a picture taken from the “Look Out” on the Lady Young Road in Trinidad. This main reason I chose it out of the many I had taken along that road is because at first glance it looks like a sea of continuous houses, but if you take a closer look, the picture offers so much dimension and detail, I simply could not use another to represent the theme “City Form and Our Perception…”

Looking at the overflowing mass of buildings, crammed together I feel like there is no space to breathe, no space to walk. From this angle, I imagine people squeezing themselves through the cracks and crannies of the city, tip-toeing around the corners of buildings, stifled by the shear amount of concrete, car fumes and humidity. Is this what Port of Spain is? Maybe not, this is all just an exaggerated analysis.

Taking a closer look I see, NAPA (the National Academy for the Performing Arts) in all its architectural glory: shiny, pleasant, modern, clean. Does this not give our city another dimension? Like a buoy floating in the sea of never-ending chaos and clutter. I feel proud of this.

If you look carefully, there’s the Queen’s Park Savannah to the right side of the picture, with little white tents peeking up amongst the green. The Savannah is known as one of the biggest parks in the Western Hemisphere and by the Guinness World Book of Records as the largest “Roundabout” in the world. Isn’t that exciting?

Cranes stand tall like giraffes grazing on the upper left hand corner of the picture, waiting for the next time they’ll be put to use, while ships wait off the coast. Oil tankers, barges, tugboats waiting to guide large ships into our Port, these together with our long-legged metal giraffes stand guard over the industrial and manufacturing sectors of Port of Spain.

In between the mass of concrete, smoke, strange noises and smells are all the characteristics of the living parts of the city. Green spaces allow our city to breathe; theatres allow her to sing so sweetly, tall buildings give her a modern and fashionable look while religious sites allow for her morals to be kept in check. What more could we want from a city, so grand, so overwhelming, so diverse...“all bright and glittering in the smokeless air”

(ii) “The form or shape of a city is known as its “morphology” and can be seen as the tangible outcome of a complex mix of socio-economic forces and the ideas and intentions of individuals, acting both within and outside a city”

- Urban Geography by Hall and Barrett.

All these aspects I have described previously attempts to flesh out this very academic definition in a more figurative and reader friendly way. My first idea of discussion based on this picture was quite obvious, ‘Overcrowding, an Urban Phenomenon’. While this sounds pretty good, (and I’m thinking maybe I should have written about that instead), I thought to myself that it sounds a little too “duh…”and just a tad on the predictable side. So instead I took a second look and to my surprise, there was so much detail in the picture that I hadn't considered in the first place. So I decided to think about “Urban Form- post colonial cities” and what that really means.

According to Hall and Barrett, Port of Spain can be seen as being a post-colonial city, or a ‘Third World City’. In their analysis of these cities, they see two main characteristics emerging: a high-rise CDB district and factories, and the presence of large areas of low status squatter settlement housing on the edges of the city which higher status housing remaining at the core. (Pacione 2009). Outside the context of this photograph is the CBD district spoken about the Pacione, is located in Downtown Port of Spain, with boundaries of Park Street, Independence Square, Richmond and Duncan Streets. The Twin Towers, The mid and high rise buildings of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, the Nicholas Towers, and Capital Plaza (formally Crowne Point Plaza make up Port of Spain’s ‘skyline’, a distinguishing characteristic of every city. On the other hand, Port of Spain also stands true to the low status settlement on the outskirts of the city. These include Lavantille and Sealots, areas of unplanned and poorly facilitated housing development. Hall and Barrett talk about this structure stemming from stark inequalities in the cities of post colonial countries, often times still in dependent relations with major post-industrial economies. While I do not believe our situation of be as “cut and dry” as this, when looking at the “materiality” of our urban structure, a reflection of our colonial, dependent past is scene, and lends with it a sobering tongue to my previous childish fantasy images of Port of Spain.

(iii) I feel like this song represents one of the many perceptions people hold of their city.

The City: by Ed Sheeran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx2WLju6f34

Also I saw this picture, and thought that it represented what I imagined Port of Spain to be in the beginning of this blog entry...