Conscious Urbanism: Sister Neighborhoods

Happy Valentine's Day. Who's your neighborhood's sweetheart this year? Yeah, you read that right. Who are you and your neighbors sending a gift to? If the answer is "nobody" (and I'm guessing that it is), consider this February 14th a missed opportunity.

There are no shortage of complaints about neighborhood associations and other community groups, the most common being that they tend to be insular, cliquey, out of touch, and outright anti-change. Another major complaint, which results directly from the aforementioned, is that these groups tend to be made up of only the higher end of the neighborhood's age range. Young people, we are reminded time and again, aren't active in their communities. They don't care enough to get involved, or they're too lazy, or they're something else that isn't the fault of the people doing the complaining.

But what if young people avoid joining community groups (as has been speculated before, no doubt) because the community groups just aren't active in a way that appeals to them? Could it be that college students, twenty- and thirtysomethings just aren't interested in joining what they view as stoic, regressive groups with their heads in the sand? I'm betting that, with a bit of elbow grease and some new ideas, we might see people below the age of 40 start to get more involved in their neighborhoods.

There are already examples of this, to be sure. Guerilla Gardening comes to mind, as do organizations like Neighbors Project and Rebar, as well as government programs like City Year. In its own (ironic) way, a lot of street art -- the kind that challenges and inspires, not those aimless spray-paint scribbles -- is evidence of young peoples' interest in their communities and their cities at large. It's not everyone's idea of being involved, but the desire to be involved in the neighborhood dynamic is apparent nonetheless. So what do all of these things have in common? What is it that gets younger generations excited about where they live, and what gets them involved? From the look of things, there is definitely an anti-bureaucratic attitude. These groups and activities are all perfect for someone who's looking to skip the runaround and get involved right away. Access is easy, and the activities are usually very social. In addition -- and more importantly -- these groups are defined more by what they stand for, not what they stand against.

Could there possibly be a way to create that kind of attitude on a larger scale within slightly more traditional community groups -- ones that might actually encourage people on both ends of the age spectrum to work together not just to improve their own neighborhoods, but their city as well? One idea: look at the Sister Cities movement.

While it is not particularly well-publicized (and, thus, utilized), Sister Cities International is an organization that pairs cities with similar economic structures, natural features, or demographics up in an effort to build a worldwide network of diplomatic relationships between urban areas. Cities help each other out by sharing policy ideas, discussing problems, and forging economic and trade agreements. What might this kind of program look like at a more local level?

On the international level, this might be a challenge, since getting people across oceans is much easier with large civic budgets instead of community group coffers (which are never full enough to begin with). But might it be productive to partner with community groups in the same city? Cross-community meetings could be held, local solutions and problems shared and discussed. The residents of a neighborhood across town cease to be faceless, and the city begins to feel smaller, its residents more tightly bound together.

There would be benefits within community groups, as well. The more hands-on, social activity of meeting and working proactively with neighbors-across-town could bring in a younger crowd. The older members of the group would gain new allies, as newly-joined young people will have more of a vested interest in preserving and strengthening their own communities through their involvement with their neighborhood group. As Matias wrote in a recent Airoots post: "[C]ommunity groups...do not defend 'local identity' as much as they create it. In other words, the moment of activism is more meaningful than the cause being defended."

Try getting together with some neighbors to form a Sister Neighborhood-esque relationship with a community group across town. Maybe next year you'll be planting a flower garden for your neighborhood's sweetheart in addition to buying a bouquet for your own. (Unless you live somewhere where it snows in February. Then you'll have to figure something else out).

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Sister Cities International

Guerilla Gardening

Neighbors Project

Rebar

City Year

The Moment of Activism (airoots)

Buy One House Get One Free (Springwise) (Not mentioned in the post, but a cool related idea)

The Sensual Experience

I've been reading it for just over a week and already completely enamoured with Spacing Wire. The most recent post from this fresh, thoughtful Toronto blog piggybacks nicely on Friday's post on dreamscapes. In it, Adam writes about Allan B. Jacobs' 1985 book Looking at Cities, which suggests (among other things) that walking is the best way to experience a neighborhood.

Re-purposing a Jacobs quote used in Adam's post: "Walking allows the observer to be in the environment with no barriers between the eyes and what is seen. The sensual experience — noises, smells, even the feel of things — is a real part of walking. There is more than you can take in: sights, sounds, smells, wondering what it might be like to live there, what it used to be like, and much more. It is an exciting, heady business."

So here's the part where several recent posts all fall together. The (Still) Made Hereseries looked at ways that neighborhoods could promote themselves effectively. So to follow up on that, how does a neighborhood convince visitors to return -- or, better yet, relocate -- once they're there? How do you make the walk worth the while?

Guerilla gardening, or just gardening in general, is one way. While urban front yards are miniscule compared to their suburban counterparts, they can greatly enhance both the house they front and the surrounding neighborhood when used effectively as a compact, colorful garden. In neighborhoods without yards, other assets can be highlighted. For an architecturally rich area, a group could post free audio walking tours as mp3s online. Ethnic or cultural enclaves could set up cross-promotional networks between businesses and organizations that add to the neighborhood's cultural cache. This could both strengthen the local business community (hopefully visually) and encourage pedestrians to continue exploring other spots that add to the local flavor.

There are plenty of ways to make a neighborhood exciting and fun to explore, which is the key to attracting people from other parts of the city (and beyond.) They key is to get visitors to slow down and take the time to experience what Jacobs refers to as "the sensual experience" of the place.

(Photo from Flickr user toshimaguy.)


Links:
Looking at cities (Spacing Wire)

Looking at Cities (the book, @ Amazon)

Conscious Urbanism: Guerrilla Gardening

NPR has a story this week about the tending of so-called "defiant gardens," which are gardens created by soldiers or prisoners in hostile environments. The NPR feature quotes author Kenneth Helphand (great last name, no?), who describes these gardens as "[exemplary of] the struggle to create something normal in the most abnormal conditions."

While it doesn't take place behind enemy lines or within the walls of a concentration camp, the contemporary phenomenon of Guerrilla Gardening seems to be similar in concept to wartime defiant gardens. Guerrilla gardeners take run-down and/or underused public green spaces -- often they are grassy areas that have been overrun by weeds -- and, under the cover of night, move in with spades and flowers and add some color to the area, so to speak. Interestingly enough, guerrilla gardeners, at least the ones on the eponymous website, speak as though they are engaged in battle, referring to the site as "an arsenal for anyone interested in the war against the neglect of public space.

It is normal for people to want to be around other people. We all crave social interaction, on some level. Culturally, we have been fed the line about the anonymous metropolis for ages. "Community," we are told, is something that cannot be found in the city. Surrounded by other people, we become a number on census charts. Cities dehumanize and isolate us. It's totally absurd, but for some reason we eat it up.

In the end, I think that this has a lot to do with scale. A city, when viewed as a whole, is a massive thing. If we look at sprawling urban areas (or even central cities) as the smallest units of measurement, of course we feel insignificant. But we have to learn to start looking at things from the neighborhood, or even the block perspective. Community is something that exists where we, as humans, create it. So where there are more people, there are more opportunities to create communities. Guerilla Gardening is a movement that creates very small, and very local changes to the cityscape, thereby redefining that cityscape as something small and local. A massive park downtown is a nice thing for a city to have, but a median or empty yard covered in flowers is something that will have a more lasting impact on the people who live in a neighborhood.

For example: I live in the Uptown area of Chicago. Every morning on my walk to the L, I pass dozens of other pedestrians running errands, exercising, or walking to and from transit. My neighborhood is about a half-hour north of the Loop (in mass transit time), which means we're within virtual spitting distance of Millennium Park. Millennium is exactly the kind of park that city governments should be building -- it's centrally located, boosts civic pride, and challenges everyone who visits it to rethink the traditional idea of the urban park. But while this fantastic amenity is one of my favorite places to take friends and family when they visit me from out of town, I get very little value out of it on a day-to-day basis. I do, however, pass a few open lots that would most certainly brighten my morning walk were they to be a source of visual excitement, as opposed to shabby holes in the urban fabric.

Guerrilla Gardening, then, is exactly the kind of thought-provoking, public-sphere-improving, subtly-subversive activity that citizens can and need to take part in to humanize their surroundings. Think about how many patches of barren grass there are in your neighborhood, and now imagine them as flowering, shade-covered oases. Big change, right? This is where the defiant gardens mentioned above come in: Guerrilla gardens are, to steal Helphand's line, examples of the struggle to create something normal in the most abnormal conditions. These gardens are about taking the urban context as an unrelatable mass of people and glass and brick and asphalt, and turning it into something small and local. It's a true grassroots (oh no, a pun!) movement.


Links:
Tending 'Defiant Gardens' During Wartime (NPR)

GuerrillaGardening.org