Not Quite a City, Not Quite a Town

A group investigating urban planning is giving faceless places we tend to call “sprawl” a second chance at city life. Maybe they will consider Bellevue, too.

Illustration by Demian Johnston

There are pieces of Bellevue that not everybody sees . . .

A woman minds a flower stand in a gas station parking lot.

A man places his hat over a pile of dog excrement, so he can easily find it after he retrieves a plastic bag from his car.

A group called “Suddenly” is instigating conversations about urban development across the country. Thankfully, boring phrases like “urban development” don’t dominate Suddenly’s conversation. Instead, with a little critical mass, a set of exhibitions, a series of public events and a book, they are working to understand the new shape of cities.

The book is a collection of essays called Where We Live Now, edited by novelist Matthew Stadler. I haven’t read the book yet. But I was excited by the background information Seattle arts leader Anne Focke sent out, promoting the next series of Suddenly events.

One of the central figures in the movement is German urban designer Thomas Sieverts. In his book Cities Without Cities, Sieverts develops the idea of “Zwischenstadt,” or the “in-between city,” to better understand the spaces in which we live, and to challenge us to consider that the design and use of spaces is not predetermined. Sieverts will visit Seattle in the first week of July to discuss how Burien represents a good model for this discussion (see suddenly.org for details).

What’s exciting to me about Sieverts’ theory is that it calls for new imagery to help architects see a space “in its different dimensions, in notions of mood and atmosphere found in many modern films (in jump cuts, in shifts and disruptions).” Better, he thinks artists and writers should be helping to create that imagery.

Kids clamber over a killer-whale fountain, while parents watch from nearby benches.

A man jogs shirtless on a road with no sidewalks.

A girl plays guitar, while a friend listens, on the front lawn of the downtown library.

A car turns into the parking lot of a salon occupying a remodeled service station.

An empty fast food store boasts a “proposed for mixed use” sign.

When Sieverts visited Beaverton, Oregon, Suddenly staged a dinner party in an abandoned parking lot behind a mall. The act summarized what seems to be the crux of the group’s mission. “One of the most important things is to invite people to explore their own turf,” Sieverts said during the dinner. “I think this is what we are now doing here in a way, discovering and appropriating a piece of land [where] none of us would have thought of having a party. I’m sure every one of us going home will have a different memory and a different conception of what a parking lot can be.”

In the past year, I have spent many hours exploring a turf called Bellevue. And what I’ve seen tells me that a group like Suddenly — or inspired by Suddenly — should be examining it. Because, like the “in-between city,” Bellevue lacks the imagery to give it a firm, positive identity.

Two teenagers in utilikilts eat fast food and watch ducklings swim in a pond.

A large group of people with small dogs only, both on and off leash, gather in a grassy area that is not a dog park.

A woman eats a snack, sitting next to a fountain outside of a bank.

Kids weave their bikes around residential streets; adults ride amid traffic on main thoroughfares.

As Sieverts says of the in-between city, Bellevue “has no suitable name, nor is it visually remarkable.” Bellevue is not just a city or just a suburb; you can’t pin it down. And then there are those cranes, which are as clear a part of the city’s character as the tech employees in SUVs shuffling around Bellevue Square.

It’s clear that, as a city, Bellevue has ideas about the future. Bellevue Downtown Park will soon open a pedestrian-friendly corridor to a public waterfront space. A few developers have made room for theatre and art in the ground-floor stalls of their high-end mixed-used developments downtown. And donors continue to add on to the wobbly tower of money it will take to build the Performing Arts Center Eastside.

You can feel the city reaching for something else. But the contrast can get lost against a backdrop of subdivisions and strip malls.

Several Eastside natives I’ve encountered (Greg Lundgren included) admit to being somehow ashamed of their heritage, partly because the small-town suburb they grew up in is not the Bellevue being cultivated today.

Medina-raised Allison Ellis, principal of Hopscotch Consulting and current Laurelhurst resident, says some of her fondest childhood memories are tied to the Skate King in Bellevue. Also, her family had a charge account at their local grocery store.

Ellis, who went to Bellevue High, describes a typical Bellevue teen experience: “Hanging around the old 7-Eleven on Main Street, you would wait until it was announced where the kegger was that night. Typically, it would be some office park with a dark parking lot, and someone’s older brother would have bought beer, and inevitably the cops would bust it.”

Virginia Bunker grew up in Bellevue, and she remembers many days spent at Surrey Downs Elementary harvesting nuts from the school’s filbert orchard, a source of income for the school. She also had a paper route.

Ellis says she wants the peaceful experience she felt growing up in Bellevue for her family, too, but she doesn’t want to go back.

“I don’t have anything against Bellevue,” says Eric Veal, who grew up on a ranch on Guemes Island; he moved to Bellevue in 2002 and has been successful in his career working for an IT consulting firm. In the long term, he sees himself moving back to the country as soon as it makes sense for him financially. “Bellevue is not my home. It’s not where my heart is.”

A readerboard carries this message: “It feels like a small world, until you have to walk home.”

Miles of houses share a backyard fence, shepherding them in a straight line away from the road.

Because of the way subdivisions are built with their backs turned to the outside world, because of the smattering of pedestrian life or street activity, because of the disappearance of local businesses and the continual rise of enormous developments, Bellevue can seem like a faceless place — all profit and clean lines with nothing “real.”

But there’s more than that.

Two older women, wearing saris, one bright yellow, the other bright orange, stroll along a sidewalk. One stops and snaps a picture of the other in front of a park fountain.

When the Suddenly crew throws a party in an empty parking lot, they’re sending a message — and it’s not that there are no good restaurants in town. They’re saying we need to reimagine our spaces and embolden our thinking, independent of the ideology of commerce. We need to build cities that we want to live in, and in the meantime protect the lives that are already here, waiting somewhere in between. •

Keep track of Suddenly's current projects on their Web site.