Welcome to I-5 Shores!
A project underway for this year’s Seattle Design Festival is right up CHS’s alley.
The “Name That Neighborhood” project is crowdsourcing the hyperlocal knowledge of Seattleites to define — and name — neighborhood boundaries across the city.
“We are gaining feedback on Seattle City Clerk’s Official Neighborhood Map from Seattleites to see if they agree or disagree with the neighborhood the City has them in,” designer — and onetime mayoral candidate — Andrew Grant Houston tells CHS about the project.
“I think this is particularly poignant given the different neighborhoods the City currently divides Capitol Hill into and could be a way to answer the question: what do we call the area around 15th?”
Houston’s House Cosmopolitan design firm is working with Yes Segura’s urban planning firm Smash The Box to collect the wisdom of the crowd of Seattle neighbors and present the data.
The collection is underway through Monday, September 1st at smashthebox.org/namethatneighborhood.
Seattle’s present day neighborhood names are the result of the weird mix of community, history, and real estate that shaped the city. CHS last wrote about how Capitol Hill ended up “Capitol Hill” a few years back. Stop by 20th and Prospect sometime to mark the strange quirks of the area’s history.
The granular neighborhood names of specific areas of Capitol Hill, meanwhile, have been a long-running theme from the earliest days of CHS as new identities emerged for these growing and changing areas of the central city.
Pike/Pine didn’t used to be called. I-5 Shores — our loving joke for the area above the crashing waves of traffic on the freeway that splits the city — somehow does not appear on real estate agent flyers — yet.
CHS’s Neighborhood Naming Project From a Few Years Back
The “Name That Neighborhood” project embraces that spirit of change and individuality. The neighborhood names you submit can be one street long or the entirety of the city east of I-5.
Houston says the goal, as better transit, walking, and riding connections are made across and through it, is to show Seattle by the parts that make it up and complete it.
“With this information we are hoping to better inform the future of Seattle as it aims to become a ’15-Minute City,’” Houston says, “a place where all of your daily needs are within a 15 minute walk/bike/roll of where you are located.”
Add your part of the city and Capitol Hill here through September 1st.
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