Best We Can

Nothing gets people talking like a shared grievance. Misery, as everyone knows, loves company, and anyone who has ever been laid off or evicted, or even had to cut back on groceries has found quick solace in the similar complaints of their friends and neighbors. Stories of the run-down neighborhood that rose from the ashes when residents banded together to fight crime, or repair abandoned homes for resale, or convert empty lots into gardens are far from uncommon. Indeed, the hard-knock neighborhood lifting itself up through a communal sharing of the burden is an archetype of urban development.

There's a lot to be worried about these days. There's a lot to complain about. But we can believe that things are going to get better; in fact, it's doubtful that they can until we do.

The Project for Public Spaces published an article on their most recent newsletter entitled How Your Community Can Thrive-- Even in Tough Times, that made the blunt but wisely-worded case that cities, now more than ever, have to use what they've got. As financial markets collapse and leave perpetually cash-strapped city governments scraping by or knee-deep in red ink, expensive programs, high-profile redevelopments, and frivolous policies can no longer be relied upon to distract any attention from the most deeply-seated problems that face their communities. "What They've Got," for cities, is suddenly much less than it was.

Jonah Lehrer, speaking recently about the late Studs Terkel's book Hard Times, made this important point: "While a depression or steep recession is a terrible thing, it does lead to a few less Rolexes. And if the Terkel interviews are any indication, it was that diminished sense of disparity - the fact that everyone was going without - that made the time bearable." One thing that cities have got, today, is an economic mess on their hands; luckily, just about anything can be seen as an opportunity in the right light, and Lehrer's comments suggest a critical urban asset that should not be overlooked in these hard times: shared struggle.

A note to all those people who have been worrying about the collapse of traditional community structure in urban neighborhoods: now is your chance to change the course. It is somewhat rare that an economic crisis hits so hard that even the relatively wealthy are genuinely hurting; at the risk of sounding overly opportunistic, it is the depth of this recession that could provide a rare chance to get neighbors talking to neighbors, and sharing the burden of hard times in the community. As stated at the outset of this post, nothing gets people talking like a shared grievance. If awkwardness or ignorance have ever been reasons for avoiding a chat with the folks next door or down the hall, everyone now has something to talk about, to share, and to help each other with.

The effect that the current crash (we can call it that, right?) is having on our economic system will undoubtedly be extreme. The fundamental building blocks of our society will change, whether we like it or not. But if you're smart, you'll make what you can of hard times, and get to know what's going on in the lives of the people around you. When something shatters The Way Things Work like we're seeing them shattered today, there are small but invaluable shards of opportunity scattered all around. To some, it might look like a mess; to the wise, it is the start of a newer Way that will be stronger than what came before it.

(Photos from Wooster Collective and Flickr user Scott Haefner. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Wow.

I'm a big fan of Jay Smooth over at Ill Doctrine, but he's outdone himself today. I was sick to my stomach when I heard about Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani mocking community organizing at the Legion of Doom's GOP's convention in St. Paul last night. But Mr. Smooth's vlog response today does a brilliant job of sucking the political bluster out of the scenario and presenting their banter plainly as what it is: an incredibly careless, openly disdainful slap in the face of everyone who actually goes out and works hard to make a difference in their community. It's a surprisingly moving take-down. Don't miss it.

You Have to Earn It

(Cross-posted from the Neighbors Project blog)I'm moving out of my current apartment at the end of the month. When I go, the next people to live here will be paying literally almost twice as much as I currently pay in rent. My neighborhood -- on the border of Wicker Park and the Ukranian Village in Chicago -- is being gentrified. I feel weirdly responsible, even in my leaving of the place. Since I don't have any control over the management company, I'm not really doing anything, per se; but as it turns out, that's exactly the problem.

Moving to a new neighborhood does not guarantee that you will be welcomed into the existing community -- especially when the neighborhood in question is going through large-scale change. I was reminded of this fact this morning while researching today's Neighbor News post. I came across this story from Pittsburgh, where a team of young urban farmers has created a working farm in one of the poorer areas of the city, bordered by one of its most infamous ghettos, The Hill. One of these people articulated quite nicely the idea that first got me involved with Neighbors Project last fall: "We're aware we didn't grow up in the Hill," she said. "We have to earn a place here."

When anyone, young or old, moves to a new neighborhood, they become agents of change. There will be things that we make worse for some people, and things that we make better for others. Few people can claim to wield the power of a developer or city councilman; indeed, our impact on a new neighborhood, as individuals, is small, but it is still important. The choice that we are each presented with is: will I merely pass through this neighborhood, or will I earn a place here?

I'll let you in on an embarrassing little secret: I never really earned a place in the community that I'm moving away from. I had originally intended to stay longer than I'm going to wind up staying, so I'd just assumed I'd get more involved in the future. I heard about neighborhood meetings and saw people out on their stoops, but I was always in a hurry. Even working closely with a group like Neighbors Project, it was easy to feel too busy to engage with my own block.

And now I can't help but wonder if, had I gotten to know the people living around me, I might have been able to find a way to keep my apartment affordable. Maybe one of my neighbors has a relative or a friend moving to town, and I could have re-signed my lease and subletted the apartment. It's a pretty fruitless line of thinking, really, since the past is the past and the rent has already been hiked. Still, it's disturbing to see how much impact a lack of effort can have, and it's made me remember why it's important to slow down and engage with my surroundings.

When you move to a neighborhood, and are immersed in a new community, remember that doing nothing within that community is doing something.

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I wrote this post recently for the blog of Neighbors Project, a nonprofit that I've become more and more involved with since I first reported on it a year ago. I've been working for NP over the summer and recently joined the National Board of Directors, and I figured that, since I can put a little of the blame on NP for the lack of posts on Where, I'd cross-post to share a bit of what I've been up to. As for Where, there are big changes on the horizon. More on that later. For now, get out and earn your place in your neighborhood.

Blogedanken Public Poll

Here are my favorite entries from each of the six Blogedanken participants who submitted full responses. Take a quick read-through, pick the one you think is the most interesting, and vote in the public poll at the bottom of the post. One-two-three, and by April 10th we'll have a winner! That person will then recieve a copy of Hyperborder, courtesy of PA Press.

Patrixbanx
(Portland, Maine, USA)
It sure would be nice to have a suburban commuter rail network in southern Maine. It would be even nicer if the commuter rail stations weren’t sited in the middle of vast parking lots, especially closer to the urban core. So why not allow development to cluster around those stops, like say Morrill’s Corner? And by development, I mean dense development. We’ll need to reform our zoning to encourage such growth, of course – not just by creating incentives for density but by creating disincentives for sprawl as well. Oh, and remember – this is Maine, a land that get’s pretty damn cold over the course of our long winters, and global warming hasn’t turned us into South Carolina just yet. Yet I hear tell of other cities even further north that are colder and get more snow than us, yet still manage to have a vibrant street life even in depressing old February. We gots to have that. I don’t know how exactly but if we’re going to discourage driving so we can have more walkable and transit oriented neighborhoods, we might as well make the streets of Portland a pleasant place to be in the depths of winter – bike and pedestrian friendly snow clearance, warm transit shelters, fun festivals, whatever it takes.

Medea
(Medellin, Colombia)
24 hour public transportation makes shifts easier to stagger, so bus drivers are not competing with each other in hazardous maneuvers. Every bus and taxi driver will receive mandatory drivers ed and courses on politeness and good manners. If they are rude or customers complain, their punishment won´t be a fine, but they´ll have to do public service hours cleaning the riverbanks.

M.B.
(Mexico City, DF, Mexico)
As a way of improving safety and bridging the gap between the city core and the bulging periphery, the city has launched a Defense of Modern Ruins program, stringing together blighted sights that range from industrial sights to downtrodden art-déco buildings to bureaucratic baroque whales. The program includes low-rent housing schemes, urban wilderness tours and itinerant party circuits.

T H Rive
(Victoria, BC, Canada)
Wireless capable crosswalks.
Edit: *apologies for the absolute shortness of mine. explanation: The crosswalk I was requesting was the ones that go green on ALL sides so that diagonal crossing is validated. It's quicker. The wireless part was more outdoor, cafe oriented Etc green wireless spaces. The result of the mixup?>> Wireless Crosswalks. Still a good idea. (4/1/08 5:38 PM)

Dan Lorentz
(Lexington, Kentucky, USA)
Organize a strong city-wide neighborhood group to promote mixed-use planning that supports street-level vitality, and make the first priority of that group the reweaving of the city's street web to create more corners for mixed-use development.

Petersigrist
(Cambridge, England, UK)
Hovering leisure boats with transparent roofs and floors, which hover about twenty feet in the air and provide lifts around town above underwater gardens with glass walls at street level as well as terraces, balconies, shops, and restaurants that open onto the streets and river



Remember: vote or die! (Hah. Always wanted to use that in context).

Having Fun with Community Planning

Wicker Park Bucktown (WPB) is a community group here in Chicago that deals with two trendy, gentrifying neighborhoods (Wicker Park and Bucktown, natch). As part of their master planning process, WPB is holding a series of open houses about which I have received several emails over the past couple of days. Looks like there will be some pretty creative activities going on at these open houses. So, seeing as I've still not had time to write a full post, here's a look at some innovative community planning ideas from WPB's press release. They certainly sound like fun, which is the first step to getting people involved...

>> A photo exhibit titled Inside is Outside, curated by WPB resident Jessica Cochran. The photo exhibit will include work by neighborhood photographers, including Ron Seymour and Carlos Flores.

>> A storytelling booth, run by BulletProof Film. In the storytelling booth, you will be asked a series of questions about the neighborhood, and then you can tell a personal story about the neighborhood. Your answers and story will be video and audio recorded as an archive of the neighborhood. We also hope to use the audio in the future to punctuate mp3 walking tours, adding some local flavor.

>> A mapping exercise, on a really really big map of the neighborhood. This is a pretty standard master plan element. You’ll be asked to indicate where you live, where you favorite place is in Wicker Park and Bucktown, and what area you think needs the most attention.

>> Postcards from the Future. Pretend it’s the year 2028, and you just visited Wicker Park and Bucktown. What did you do? What was the neighborhood like? This is your opportunity to describe how you see the neighborhood in 20 years.

>> Photo suggestion box. What’s your big idea for the neighborhood? In the other activities, we’ve asked you to answer questions and write about your vision for the future, but what are we missing? Write it down on our thought-bubble chalkboard, and we’ll take a picture of you with your big idea.

>> DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Budget. WPB has to submit a budget to the City of Chicago each year for approval. How would you spend the money? We’ll give you fake money to deposit into 8 different piggy banks, representing the 8 categories of WPB’s budget.

>> Panel discussions. At 1pm on each Saturday there will be a panel discussion. The first panel discussion, March 29, will feature three local business owners whose businesses have grown over the years. The panel will include: Noam Frankel, Greener Cleaner; Sue Daly, Renegade Craft Fair; and Bill Jacobs, Piece Brewery and Pizzeria. The panel will be moderated by Suzanne Keers, Co-founder of Local First Chicago. The details of the other two panel discussions will be posted soon, so check back for details.

For more information about the open houses, which will be held on Saturdays March 29, April 5, April 12 from 10am - 4pm at 1275 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, check out the link below.

(Photo from Flickr user -- and friend of Where -- Chris Brunn. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
WPB Master Plan Open Houses

West North (Thanks to Payton for the heads up).

The Staten Island of Tomorrow

The following comment was made in response to a post at the NY Times blog Dot Earth about the future of suburbia:

"The answer to can we uninvent Suburbia is Queens, which in my youth was essentially a suburb and is now a city. Before that in my father’s time it was Brooklyn, a borough of little villages, and more recently Staten Island. The best way of accomplishing this is through good urban transit. In the DC area where I now live, the biggest mall (Tyson’s corner) is in despair trying to attract a new Metro line. The most successful new malls (White Flint and Pentagon City) are on the Metro."
— Posted by Eli Rabett

Building on yesterday's post, how plausible might it be to link Staten Island to Brooklyn or Manhattan with an underwater tunnel neighborhood? Would it be possible to extend the 1 train from South Ferry to Tottenville? Could an entire transit corridor lined with high-density underwater apartment complexes and shopping centers finally provide a high-speed link between the forgotten fifth borough and "The City"? Lord, maybe they could bring back the 9 so that it could run express and actually serve a purpose.

But then, who would want to live in New York Harbor? Something tells me the view is less than pristine.

Still, it's an interesting concept; Staten Island as the new frontier in New York City...

(Photo from Flickr user dclarson. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Can We Uninvent Suburbia? (Dot Earth)

The Craig Hartman Interview - Part II

This is the second part of Where's interview with Craig W. Hartman of SOM San Francisco about the firm's Treasure Island redevelopment plan. You can find the first part HERE.

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Where: Thanks for bringing up the neighborhood context, because that's exactly what I wanted to talk about next; you've provided my segue for me. The SOM San Francisco site has a description of the Treasure Island (TI) project and it goes into some of the details [of this plan], and one of the terms that keeps popping up in that is "island life." I got a kick out of that, because there's this idea of island life and, traditionally, I think you kind of think of the Caribbean -- you've got the drink in one hand and you're laid out on the beach and there are palm trees. There is a very relaxed and social connotation to "island life"...I'm interested in how you're creating community on this little island, because it is separate from the main city. As much as it has been integrated through transit, it's going to be sort of off on its own in some ways. So how is community built, and how is that urban lifestyle cultivated through the way that the site is designed?

Craig Hartman: That is really the crux of the issue here, and an interesting question, because I don't think anyone can really know what the nature of social and cultural life will eventually be on the island. The idea is to understand the unique culture of San Francisco and to try to find a way to transplant that to this island. And yet the island is a place apart and it’s culture is obviously going to morph into something that has its own character. I think most people would agree that one of the qualities of San Francisco culture is a very strong spirit of inclusiveness. I think there is an ethos held by the majority of the people who live here that accepts different lifestyles, and that an ethos that really honors the public realm; maybe even to give preference to the public realm over private interests. And there is certainly an ethos here that values environmental stewardship.

The social and cultural life of the island will evolve in a way that reflects the values of those who live there. What we are trying to do is to make the place one that provides a very rich set of public spaces that are consciously designed to encourage this idea of social connection and, hopefully, social inclusiveness. There are some very basic, pragmatic things being done about diversity of housing types that will cater toward a wide variety of demographics: of young single people, of families, wealthy people and people who have low and middle incomes. The idea is to make this a mix of the sort one would find in a real city, not an artificial, gated community with a single monoculture.

So we're trying to find ways in the planning of this island and the design of its architecture to enhance those qualities. That's what we mean when we talk about an urban ecology. We need to consider how we [can be] good stewards of the natural environment, but at the same time, we also want to think about the anthropological quality of this place, and that has to do with the culture. So on Treasure Island we are trying to weave the two together into a holistic ecology that brings together the natural environment and human culture.

And yes, "island life" as you suggest, brings Margaritaville to mind, but the intent is to make an authentic place that recognizes its unique place at the beginning of the 21st Century and in the middle of San Francisco Bay.


W: One of the big principles behind public space right now that's really getting a lot of attention is the idea of deliberately designing for a mix of different uses, too. In addition to designing for a large variety of people, you want it to be spaces that are used at all times of the day and night. Are these pocket parks a way of trying to make this -- I don't want to say a 24-hour neighborhood, because that has it's own cheesy connotations -- but was there an attempt to create social spaces that kept this neighborhood going at all times of the day and night, essentially?

CH: Yes and a lot of this is going to be evolving over the long gestation period of the island’s development period. Right now we are marking the basic intentions. As for the design, some of these parcels of land will be developed by various different developers. There will be many different architects involved over time. So all of these ideas will be evolving. Right now, we're trying to set in place a very strong framework that encourages certain things to happen. In terms of the smaller neighborhoods, the idea is that there will be a provision for flexible community space that provides a place for people to come together for various informal activities. These could range from someone setting up a fruit stand on a Saturday morning to providing a place for community gatherings or a barbeque or smaller retail-oriented spaces. Basics like dry cleaners or a shoe shop or coffee shops will be provided within smaller spaces spread throughout the neighborhood parks. This is an experiment that will be tested over time, to see how much and what kind of life these parks should have.

The development will also incorporate retail and entertainment -- restaurants, cafes, boutiques along grocery and produce and other neighborhood serving retail – in concert with the historic buildings along the Marina side, which faces Yerba Buena Island. The intention is to allow the neighborhoods to be fairly quiet places in the evenings with just the right balance of life, while having the high activity entry zone on the southeast corner of the island where everyone, residents and visitors alike, arrive. One of the challenges of broad mixed use is that the developer’s analysis has shown that this island cannot support a significant amount of office space. Therefore, [the plan] is heavily weighted toward residential. There will be some professional office space, but not a lot. I am sure that as excitement builds when the project starts there will be more interest by cultural institutions as well.


W: Let's step in a slightly different direction and talk about the architecture of the buildings on the site. You said that this is going to be developed over a long period of time, probably by different developers with many different architects, so...are there architectural guidelines for what's going to be built, or is it kind of a "design as you will" attitude, or how is that being approached? Because there's definitely a pretty solid aesthetic to the renderings that have been produced so far. It's very modern, with the crystalline towers...

CH: I worked on a series of ideas which we translated into a drawing for an exhibition that Darrin Alfred of SFMOMA and Julie Kim curated for the AIA in September called Street Cred. It was a speculative rendering of one of the streets on TI that does convey ideas I hope will be carried through in the island’s architecture. The drawings illustrate buildings that have a very strong orientation to the street. I worked with Tom Leader on the environmental ideas and you'll notice that the landscape favors a kind of riparian aesthetic that's much wilder, or natural, than what you might think of as usual in more formal urban landscape architecture. It is my personal belief that the defining architectural aesthetics must have an authenticity which includes the issues we have been discussing regarding setting and place and especially recognizes its temporal setting – that is, the beginning of the 21st century and contemporaneous aesthetics. How specific the base developers and the master plan architect can be in terms of the aesthetics of the island is going to be something that will be evolving. From a personal point of view, I am not a great believer in rigid architectural guidelines. As an architect, I've often found them unnecessarily constraining. Often they rigidly define a singular set of ideas frozen at a point in time and don't allow for the kind of contemporary spontaneity that happens when things are built over years or decades.

The architecture of great cities has an organic quality that incrementally develops. So the goal here will be to find a way to encourage a kind of familial overlay but with it variety. The important thing is that all the work be ambitious architecture. To achieve that requires recruiting the best and most talented design architects to work on the various components over time. It should be a rigorous process. I hope I qualify for a piece of it….


W: So the renderings that exist now, where there are generic buildings for the low-rises for the most part, there are the high-rises as well, which certainly have a more distinct look to them -- the main tower is what I'm thinking of, really -- so are those designed to be built as they look here or are those just massing studies or examples of what could be.

CH: Well they are massing studies, but they are inspired by a set of ideas that are consistent with the overall island design. These renderings represent a very clear attitude about the relationship between architecture and the natural environment. The low-rise buildings are designed to shelter public space from the wind. The height and scale are related to the scale of the spaces they define. We are working on making very narrow streets to create a sense of intimate public space and maximize the potential for social interaction. Most of the people on the island, approximately 75%, will be housed in these lowrise homes.

The mid-rise buildings are the ones that are typically positioned at each of the neighborhood parks we discussed earlier. These small towers mark each neighborhood cluster on the skyline, providing an overall sense of identity and place. These towers are intentionally placed on the north and west sides of these parks to allow the maximum amount of sunlight in the public spaces while providing a wind buffer. And the shape of the towers themselves, if you look at the plan, is a lozenge shape or kind of a rounded trapezoidal footprint. It's like a sailboat, with the bow pointed into the wind. We are presenting the smallest face to the west to let the wind slip by the building with minimum disturbance. Tall buildings can create what we call a "sail effect," where the face of the building that is the leeward side tends to lower wind pressure and bring wind down into public spaces. We have positioned these buildings on the island to minimize any negative effects of wind at the pedestrian scale.

Finally, the tall buildings as shown in the drawing are shaped in a way that is meant to convey a very organic aesthetic. The intent is to create towers that might be more aligned with a cyprus or a redwood than with a machine-made object. We are able to do this because our computers today allow us to analyze structures in ways that are much more supple and nuanced than we ever could have fifteen or twenty years ago. Consequently, we are able to create what was shown on that rendering: the form of an exoskeleton that provides for the seismic bracing of a tall building while allowing for a great deal of glass around the perimeter so we can have as much light as possible inside the building.

The shapes of the buildings will be tested further. The intent is to develop a language that reinforces the basic tenets of the island plan. The aspiration should be for a level of authenticity that can serve as an example to inspire those architects who come after us rather than writing down a set of rules that they have to follow. The most critical issue is to achieve a uniformly high level of architectural excellence, not architectural uniformity. This comes back to the need to consistently select the best design architects – and the need for a mechanism or process to make sure that happens over the course of the island’s development. It should be a highly sought-after honor in the 21st century, as it was for example during the last half of the 20th in Columbus, Indiana, to be selected to design a building at Treasure Island.

W: So it's more of a general aesthetic design than the hard and fast architectural code that, actually, the suburbs get a lot of flak for.

CH: Exactly.


W: The one question I wanted to ask to wrap up would be that I read something about this having some level of approval from the city...is it the plan that was approved?

CH: The basic land concept was approved by the TI Development Authority and has been very well received by virtually all stake holders and the public. But the process continues….

W: Alright. So what is the general status of the project right now?

CH: The general status is that is the negotiation process with the Navy regarding the transfer of the land is continuing. But I understand it is coming to a final resolution, so we are now re-starting again our detailed planning studies to take it to the next stage.

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Thanks again to Craig for doing this interview. Where is looking forward to seeing this project break ground!!



Links:
The Craig Hartman Interview - Part I

Bending the Grid (SOM) (photo credits)

Airoots Gets Lost in Deep Urbanmess (Guest Post by Matias Sendoa Echanove and Rahul Srivastava)

We arrive at a narrow commercial street lost somewhere between Bombay and Tokyo. It is crowded with pedestrians, bicycles, street vendors, food stalls, and wandering cows and dogs that don’t allow cars to pass through. Most of the buildings lining the street are two to three stories high, covered either with faded, dusty shop-signs painted in art-deco fonts, or snazzy neon lights. Billboards with smiling Manga faces and Bollywood movie stars eye each other warily.

An intricate web of wires, pipes, pathways, and cables connect the buildings, huts, cottages and shop-fronts to each other. They hang overhead or lie snugly underground. They are like masses of snakes intertwined into each other – alive and organic. They buzz with whispering voices, crackle with coded e-mails and crisp exchange of smses, gurgle with water or sewage and are swollen with pornographic images looking for immediate release, along with religious icons that appear on screens of high-tech devotees who bow to them in tiny studios.

The air is abuzz with invisible energy fields. Wireless networks that feed on cables and transmit the cyber-world into this dense neighbourhood. They compete for airspace with the smells of food, fish, gutters, and incense and the crowded sounds of the city.


Walking through the gulleys and streets one sees second-hand electronic shops selling tiny bits of chips and wires. We bump into a bull, resting in front of a poster selling Chinese medicine. Withdrawing, we stumble over a robot-dog who yelps angrily, snapping mechanically and uselessly at our ankles.

Going deeper one sees nimble hands stripping off circuit-board wires. They magically transform the pieces into copper jewelry that is marketed as tribal art. On one side otakus and geeks wait to devour cheap electronic left-overs – on the other, hippies and high-fashion lovers wait to decorate themselves with re-designed electronic waste.

An entrance to one street looks particularly crowded. It is lined with Japanese tea-shops, Iranian Samovar-houses and Chai-stalls served by kids. Old men and women sip tea, keeping an eye on children playing dangerously close to railway tracks. The street shudders as two trains zoom pass each other – one a yellow and brown old-fashioned rusty local train with open doors and another a sleek silver, futuristic machine made of steel, its windows covered with dark tinted glass.


The sound of new stalls being put up and old ones being pulled down rent the air. A bearded man with wild eyes sells mangas in a makeshift stall right next to an old sadhu with dirty, matted hair, who tells your fortune. The mangaman reads out stories to a group of teenaged girls who giggle crazily as he shows them explicit pictures. The palmist-cum-astrologer catches a hapless European tourist and predicts that he will hook up with one of the teenaged girls, who is already smiling at him.

The two connect and vanish around the corner hand in hand. To be continued...


(All of the images above are photoshop collages of Bombay and Tokyo.)

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Big thanks to today's guest bloggers! Matias Sendoa Echanove and Rahul Srivastava are the bloggers behind Airoots/Eirut. Check out their blog for more ruminations on "adventitious roots, urban forests & villages, natural cities, lost tribes, new nomads, and everything in between."

Opening Planning

"[A] problem I think we have in the arts is the over-professionalization of art. What I mean by that is, it is the ethos of the professional artist to present the final piece, with no warts, no rough edges. This is the art. We do not allow you backstage to see the process. I think Americans, and people in every culture, want to see the creative process. And I think professional artists have alientated their publics by not allowing them in...You don't have to change the art form, but the audience should know how hard it is to perform a new piece of orchestral music, and they should see the first violins struggling, having to do it over and over again. There has to be a way to allow our artists to be more vulnerable and to open up the creative process and invite people in." -- Steven Tepper on Smart City Radio

Hearing this quote from the September 13th edition of SCR (I'm a bit backed up on my podcasts this month) made me recall an art project I'd read about in dezeen a while back. The project, called If Gio Only Knew..., was a design/build-reuse-performance-art thingy (if you will) in which the artist (Martino Gamper) took classic pieces of Gio Ponti-designed furniture and took them apart to refashion them into new pieces of furniture. The results were uneven and sometimes downright ugly, but the project stayed in the back of my mind.

It was hearing Tepper opine about the overprofessionalization of art that made me realize what I had really liked about Gamper's little adaptive reuse experiment: he let his audience backstage. Even if you weren't at Design Miami/Basel, where the Pontis were refashioned into Gampers, you can watch a video of the re-design process. Even while the results of each reconstruction may not have been aesthetically pleasing, someone who is interested in furniture design can watch the video and learn about Gamper's creative process, and try to come to some better understanding of how and why he rebuilt the pieces as he did.

Of course, my brain started to try to translate this Aha! moment into urban design, which is one of the most underappreciated artistic fields. How cities could benefit from a more open planning process was obvious; people who understand why something in their neighborhood is changing are more likely to approve of it and, if they don't, are able to offer more focused critique of why the change is inappropriate. But how could such understanding be achieved? Even with public hearings and meetings and partnerships, there still seems to be a very negative attitude toward planners, at least in the US.

It's a public relations problem, when you boil it down. Not the evil kind of PR that tells lots of happy little lies to obscure a big ugly truth, but plain old-fashioned direct communication. It has been well-lamented that civic engagement is lacking in the twenty- and thirtysomething crowd that carries the bulk of the weight of gentrification on their shoulders. Whole groups have been formed to address this very problem (see Neighbors Project in the sidebar for a good example). The PR issue is twofold, then: older urbanites know too much about old-school planning from the 1950s and 60s to trust contemporary planners, and younger urbanites (often suburban imports with little to no understanding of how cities are shaped) who know too little about planning to care.

Planetizen's Interchange blog had a great post last week from Scott Page, a planner himself, that discussed the urban planning field's apparent identity crisis of late. In it, he laments what is essentially the overprofessionalization of the planning field. "In this process of defining who we are, are we not" he asks, "leaving out people that are, in fact, planners but not trained as such?...Let’s champion planning as an art that merges vision with pragmatic thinking. And let’s find a better way to define our community which, ironically, is precisely what we are trained to do."

The need for a more inclusive and open planning community -- in which there is plenty of room for professional planners -- is apparent as cities begin to acknowledge that, in the face of increasingly complex problems, solutions must come from all corners. But what can break down this overprofessionalization? How does the audience (the citizenry of a given metropolis) understand how planning works, and how small changes (and even inconvenient ones) can contribute to a larger solution? How do planners "open up the creative process and invite people in?"

(Photo from Flickr user seanfrom.)


Links:
Urban Innovations (Smart City Radio)

If Gio Only Knew... (dezeen)

Our collective identity crisis (Interchange)

Conveyer's Subjective Atlas of Jersey City

Josef Reyes, the publisher/editor of Conveyer, was kind enough to send me the latest copy of the zine that, in Reyes' words, "[attempts to articulate] Jersey City's 'sense of place' by documenting snatches of daily life in the city. The idea is that by examining how people experience the city on an everyday basis, we get a vivid picture of what the city really feels like."

Overall, Conveyer is a very thoughtful read, but my favorite part came right at the beginning; "A Subjective Atlas of Jersey City" is made up of four maps, hand drawn by individual JC residents, accompanied by photos of the places marked and explained on the maps. It's likely that this has been done somewhere before, but that hardly lessens the impact of the article. This simple mapping out of different peoples' experiences of the city, as disparate as they are, helps to form an idea of what it might be like to live in Jersey City.

Reading about urban design projects or shiny new buildings or traffic problems in cities scattered across the globe is easy enough to do; that is to say, there's no shortage. Nor do we lack stories on what it's like to visit these disparate places; if anything, there are too many stories about what it's like to be a rich tourist in a foreign city. But the stories that seem hard to come by are the ones that tell us what life is like, day to day, in a given place. What, we are left to wonder, are the places with these fabulous buildings, avenues, and metro stations really like for the people why actually use them?

In its mission to shed some light on this question for Jersey City, Conveyer succeeds most readily with the "Subjective Atlas." It's a really lovely collection, and it manages to convey (oops, a pun!) a great deal of meaning in a relatively short space. The places that the reader learns about through the maps become almost personal; the vicarious experience of the reading scratches the same itch as reality TV...yet it does so in a much more satisfying way. The maps are scripted, in their own way, but this is done by the person whose life we are peeking into, not for them.

Jeff Edwards' map depicts the neighborhood where he and his s.o. Amy were living in September of 2001. Edwards makes his own experience of the 9-11 attacks real by using the context of his former community to illustrate how he grappled with the effects of what happened that day. We learn about the place by learning about the people who live[d] there. The last marker on the map, at the bottom of the page, is an arrow pointing away from the neighborhood. "On the first anniversary of 9-11, [we] were working on a condo we had just bought. Our new neighborhood is this way. Sometimes we miss the old one." And I couldn't help but think, as I turned the page, that I kind of would, too.


Links:
Conveyer (Image credit)

Review: Last Harvest by Witold Rybczynski

Witold Rybczynski, author of Home, A Clearing in the Distance, and (my favorite) City Life, has two new books out. Well, it's actually only one book, entitled Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville, but it feels like two. As is the case in several of his previous books, Rybczynski alternates between a narrative that acts as the backbone of the book and a series of intellectual asides that, together, form a sort of supportive history to said backbone story. Normally this works well, with the historical details serving to enrich the central story line, but in Last Harvest, the two are separated more severely than in previous books. In short, one is highly engrossing and the other is...not so much.

In Rybczynski's defense, it should be stated at the outset that not even F. Scott Fitzgerald could jazz up the topic: residential suburban development. For those who aren't terribly interested in real estate (or even just this decidedly un-glamorous side of it) the backbone narrative, which tracks the conversion of a piece of farmland in the town of Londonderry in exurban Philadelphia into what is alternately called a "neotraditional neighborhood" and a "traditional neighborhood development" (or TND), is a challenge. There is bureaucracy, there is endless compromise, there is an utter lack of desire on the part of the developer to create the kind of real design guidelines that supposedly make these types of subdivisions -- sorry, communities -- work. About halfway through the book Tim Cassidy, a landscape architect on the Londonderry planning commission, explains to the author: "In reality, anything [the developers] build probably will be mediocre. But if they shoot for mediocre, it will just be terrible!" Near the end, Cassidy explains his opinion of the now-under construction project: "I guess I would have to say it's probably what I expected, because I expected to be disappointed." My sentiments exactly.

Upon deciding to write a book about subdivision development, Rybczynski took a gamble. Had he started tracking a neotraditional development that wound up working, this part of the book might have been more interesting. (For evidence of this, one need look no further than the section of Last Harvest that deals with Vince Graham's Newpoint development in Beaufort, SC.) Unfortunately, he wound up with a dud. But the parts of Last Harvest that track the history of suburban development in the United States wind up not only overshadowing the narrative -- they relegate it to the role of a rather long case study. Indeed, these fascinating asides, collected together, could be sold as a separate book. In them, the author covers everything from the well-planned early garden suburbs (including Chestnut Hill in Philly, where he lives), to Frank Lloyd Wright's prescient Broadacre City plans and the way that the Levitt brothers (of Levittown fame) disseminated those ideas to the masses. The best is probably the section that rather successfully argues that the standard suburban ranch house represents one of the most radical architectural departures in American history. I wouldn't be lying if I told you that Rybczynski makes the history of suburbia almost fun to read.

But even here, there is a hitch. About a third of the way into Last Harvest, Rybczynski's generally objective and academic voice cracks. "For the first time in history," he writes, "urbanization does not mean concentration." This opinion, which rather sneakily passes for observation in the context of the chapter, sets a very subtly pro-exurban development tone for the book. Granted, this is obviously not an anti-exurb book. It was frustrating, nonetheless, to see the definition of urbanity undermined in such a way. Urbanization is a term that describes the process of making an environment urban. There is a reason that the sub- prefix is added to the term to describe the kind of sprawling, decentralized growth like that described in Long Harvest. A suburban environment is, by nature, less than urban. This is not a comment on quality (though many would argue otherwise), but quantity. Urbanization is intrinsically tied to concentration (of many things), and suggesting the contrary is Rybczynski's one misstep in his careful plotting-out of the evolution of the American suburb.

Suburbia is what it is. Long Harvest, then, does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand the suburb for what it is. While by no means arresting, Rybczynski's recounting of the many tedious details of the development and planning process for one small subdivision -- sorry, communi...oh, forget that -- is certainly enlightening for anyone who wants to understand why so many of today's suburban developments look the way they do. Even better, if you can look past some semantic flubbery, it provides a wonderfully engaging history of how they got to their current state. At the very least, that history will give any good urbanist something to chew on. And what else can you ask a good summer book to do?


Links:
Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville (Powells.com)

NewDaleville.com

WEEKEND READING: June 16-22, 2007

This week kind of flew by. That's a good thing, though, so please don't mistake that last sentence for a complaint.

ITEM ONE: I'm a bit late in posting this entertaining piece about a real(ish) State of Mind at the Venice Biennale, but it's worth the read.

ITEM TWO: Attention all green dreamers -- the race is on to build the first "Living Building," as reported by CEOS for Cities. Perhaps living glass will help?

ITEM THREE: Another place-y linkgasm over at growabrain.

ITEM FOUR: Trying to get from here to there (with here being a gridlocked freeway and there being an airport)? Check out this brilliant little nugget of entrepreneurial ingenuity.

ITEM FIVE: Placekraft is taking on a new Chicago-centric mapping project based around the ephemeral "art world."

ITEM SIX: The Breuer tower in Cleveland covered in the first Where post has become rather ubiquitous. Even the NY Times thinks so.

ITEM SEVEN: An absolutely side-splitting Onion article about large-scale neighborhood redevelopment and the people who try to stop it.

Enjoy your weekend! I'll be checking out the Future Cities exhibit here at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, so watch for that to show up in a post next week.

(Photo from Flickr user John Drain.)

(Still) Made Here: Support

The last of the three subtrends of (Still) Made Here has a much more straightforward connection to urbanism. Support is about "the importance of community...[and] supporting one’s neighborhood, one’s city, one’s region, to regain a sense of place and belonging and to safeguard future access to the special and original, vs. the bland, the global and the commoditized." What the Trendwatching.com folks are talking about here is brand loyalty, with geography as the brand.

A big part of creating an attractive public identity for a neighborhood involves canceling out worries about the perceived hassles and drawbacks of urban life. One of the main complaints about urban life (and suburban life as well) is that traffic and congestion will make life more difficult. While city governments can encourage walking and transit usage all they want, this is not enough. Creative solutions must be found to make life at least seem simpler.

Pop to the Shops, which is covered more thoroughly in the TW report, is one of these such solutions. This online service allows residents of select cities in South Wales to shop at small local businesses for fresh food and other products and have them delivered straight to their door. On top of chipping away at perceived congestion problems by eliminating a shopper's time spent traveling to and from the grocery store while simultaneously raising the quality of the food they are eating, this service rather brilliantly taps into the story component from the previous subtrend. Even after the novelty wears off, living in a neighborhood where fresh produce and milk are delivered to your doorstep every few days still earns bragging rights. In other words, it's something that people will tell their friends about, and something that their friends will then look for themselves.

Support for independent, locally-owned businesses has always been a part of urban life. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described patronizing the shops that were owned and operated by her neighbors. Neighborhoods are only as strong as the communities that are formed within them. Communities, then, are joint ventures between groups of people who live within close proximity to each other to make something beautiful out of their surroundings. Again, I'm getting overly clinical, but if you consider all of the people in a community to be partners within a joint venture, it becomes easier to see why stengthening ties between the residential and commercial interest-holders is a vital part of creating the kind of place where people want to be.

People take to local stores. Coffee shops, restaurants, convenience stores -- all of these things become very important (if taken-for-granted) pieces of their neighborhoods' urban fabric. This happens because no one is going to brag about their neighborhood Starbucks or McDonald's. Well, I suppose there are probably exceptions to that rule, but I'd be willing to bet that the number of exceptions is by no means large enough to create buzz around a city neighborhood. So to promote local businesses in any way -- especially by helping them to compete with global conglomorates by connecting them to their customers through the internet -- is to improve the health of the neighborhood overall.

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To sum up this little exploration of the (Still) Made Here trend, I've paraphrased the questions posed by TW's editing team to entrepreneurs to make them more applicable to the marketing/public perception problems facing many urban neighborhoods. These are questions that, I hope, can be used by neighborhood groups to examine what people like about their neighborhood, how to tell its story in a captivating and compelling way, and how to get that story out there, into the proverbial ether. "Asset-based" planning has been a part of the planning vocabulary for a while now. The next step is to realize the potential of the intangible -- the cultural story of a place -- to neighborhood revitalization. And so:

Who might enjoy knowing more about our neighborhood, and would be interested in accessing our neighborhood's history, from an eco or ethics angle? How could we embed our cultural story to the public's perception of our neighborhood?

Is there an opportunity in creating a bold statement piece (manifesto, etc.) or turning an aspect of our neighborhood's current reputation into a distinctly local play, including a compelling local story? Who can we partner with to help us highlight this part of our neighborhood's story?

Can we promote unique and obscure local businesses, helping our neighbors to tell our cultural story to others in a more compelling way? Should we create new and/or innovative services that do this, if many local businesses are similar to those found in other, nearby neighborhoods?


Links:
(Still) Made Here (Trendwatching.com)

Pop to the Shops

Part I: Eco and Ethics

Part II: Story and Status