A happening across San Francisco’s Hilliest Streets
San Francisco drapes its urban grid over 48 hills. The streets undulate like roller coasters, distorting distance while amplifying perspective, often rippling beyond the physical into the social. The city’s steep roadways perform for one another, functioning simultaneously as the theatrical rake and the elevated stage, at once observer and the observed.3 To move through the city is to inhabit volumetric space in four dimensions. Where the grid concedes to inclination, snaking around contours of once-ocean-covered serpentine, rupturing to reveal concrete walls divided by vegetated staircases in perpetual bloom, the human and non-human linger where a vehicle cannot.
Steep Urbanists is aseries of happenings choreographed to traverse these urban slopes, guiding participants through movements designed to develop somatic connections between one another and the undulating environment, mediated by the concrete infrastructures which bring the pedestrian into negotiation with gravity and terrain. The community is invited to “a participatory experience in human movement and spatial perspective across San Francisco’s hilliest streets.”
Dancer Dr. Adesola Akinleye proposes movement through a site as the shared interest between urban designers and choreographers, as a method for noticing the expansion of time and space through the senses, and as a spatial practice for identifying ourselves within place-based communities.4 In moving together through the spaces that result when human geography, topography, and infrastructure intersect, steep urbanists engaged with narratives of the ways mountains shape mental geographies, the role hills have played in spirituality, and how topography has come to be subjugated by modern planning and architecture as forces to control and repel.
The happening riffs on the urban walking tour format, stealing the gaze away from fixed, built forms towards an active collective-construction of embodied positions within the contours of the terrain and develops land-based knowledge. Participants carry synchronized speakers playing music curated to correspond to the shifting dynamics between hardness and softness, concave and convex, wildness and rigidity, and the kinetic and potential energy of the pre-planned route, inviting the graphic score to escalate into improvisation. Live narration recounts the history of urban planning in San Francisco and its attempts to agnostically apply a two dimensional orthogonal cartesian logic by traversing the places the grid dissolves and warps to concede to forces more powerful than man, engaging in kinesis between gravity and incline. As participants dance inside a wall holding back tonnes of tilted soil, the eyeline intersects with a snail slithering up a hairy fern, then scans 180 degrees at the elevation of an unleased corporate penthouse, blindingly reflecting the sun’s angle.
Steep Urbanists is inspired by the Happenings5 of the Fluxus artists in the 1960s and the Tape Music Center in San Francisco, such as the “City Scale” in 1965, which was described as “a polysensory environmental citywide performance” embedded into the “found environment, since it constructed a score of programmed events in the city for a moving audience, with minimal transformations of space” and “impinged upon the life of the city, interacted with it, transformed it, or absorbed it into the structure of the work.”6 A simple, shared movement can shift collective energy to disrupt, resist, and reclaim space. Dancing in public landscapes is a form of making kin with the environment through community-building, as well as a platform to imagine collective action.
Borrowing words from Donna Harraway, I invite you to dance in the “time-space of symbiogenetic and sympoietic earthly being, those now submerged and squashed in the tunnels, caves, remnants, edges, and crevices of damaged waters, airs, and lands.”7 Rather than world-building through form, the happening is an act of sympoiesis, or “making-with” in “polytemporal, polyspatial knottings,” an act of becoming entwined with land of which we are a part.
Steep Urbanists’ happenings were developed and disguised as walking tours hosted by the AIA National Conference in 2023 and the AIA Architecture in the City Festival in 2022, evolving from a manifesto on how to become better symbionts with earth in the face of the climate emergency. In inviting spectators to become participants, we could together wonder whether we dance with the earth, or are we being danced by the earth?
Notes
1. Leakey, Richard E, and Roger Lewin. Origins Reconsidered : In Search of What Makes Us Human. New York, Anchor Books, 1993.
2. Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet : A New Look at Evolution. New York, Basic Books, 2008.
3. Lipsky, Florence. Grid Meets the Hills. Editions Parenthèses, 1999.
4. Adesola Akinleye. Navigations. Teatrum Mundi, 1 Apr. 2023.
5. “Happenings” – FLUXUSMUSEUM.
6. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Esther Choi and Greg Castillo
7. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, Duke University Press, 2016.