Brand Avenue

Beyond Sprawl

In a spectacular Web post, Patterson, the county executive of Oakland County, Mich., continued to wax poetic on the topic: “I love sprawl. I need it. I promote it. Oakland County can’t get enough of it. Are you getting the picture? Sprawl is not evil. In fact, it is good … [it] is new jobs, new hope and the fulfillment of lifelong dreams.”

Patterson’s rousing stump speech for sprawl is emblematic of how we as a culture are far too invested in a vision of the American dream that doesn’t make sense in the 21st century. Over the past 30 years we’ve stripped away the supporting mechanisms of sprawl but have continued to create it.

We’ve built more houses than we’ve needed — and built them farther away from jobs. This has led to longer commutes, which has created more traffic. In response, we built more highways, increasing fuel consumption and, as transportation planners acknowledge, doing little if anything to reduce traffic. It’s a vicious, seemingly endless cycle, and at its core is the notion that the American dream can exist only within the framework of the single-family home on a large lot.

Indeed, we’ve become so fixated on this as the sole delivery mechanism of that American dream that we’ve spent a disproportionate amount of our collective energies (home-) improving it without considering meaningful alternative visions — or devoting at least a smidgen of attention to what’s outside the front door or down the block. Everything in our culture today reinforces this idea of home as castle (or fortress) rather than home as part of a larger whole (i.e., neighborhood). We need to find our way to the latter view, and part of that means finding a better way to talk about it.

The good news is that more and more people are.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Another country, other cities, and other ways of life are possible, but we have to want them. They don't just happen to us.

Ode to a Place Whose Best Stories Haven't Yet Been Written

When someone says they love a city — or hate it — they are often telling you what they think of the version of themselves they see reflected in it. They love — or hate — who they are in that city. I love Berlin, Seville, and New York. I came to a grudging kind of love for Delhi. I fell out of love with Toronto. I love Montreal, but don’t we all, often with the adoration for a starlet on a screen, in a place you will never really belong. I’ve never had much time for Vancouver or Ottawa. I’ve hated London more than once, and I’m not sure why (but I do know it’s me, not London). The hardest love is the everyday kind, the one that lingers on after commuter traffic and parent-teacher interviews and byzantine arguments at City Hall. The kind I have found, to my surprise and delight, that I now have for Calgary. It’s the reason why I’m here. Still. Indefinitely.

Why stay? There are mundane material explanations, of course. Because my wife grew up in a house on an artificial lake called Bonavista in the southern suburbs, because her father is here and comes by to take the kids to the zoo, because we could buy a great little patch of 100-year-old downtown property just before the boom priced us out of the last big Canadian urban market we could afford. Because it’s sunny 300 days a year, because even on the coldest day the next chinook might already be on its way. But that’s not it, not all of it. That’s logistics, not poetry.

I’m dug in. It still surprises me sometimes, but I am. I’m here because Calgary is a city whose best stories haven’t been told too many times. Because it’s a city whose best stories maybe haven’t even been written yet. I’m here because everything but the cowboy hat is still an open question, wide open like the prairie, hinting on the horizon of soaring mountains. It is a young city, stupid and headstrong, brilliant and bold, and it may embarrass itself (again), but it will probably surprise you yet. It surprised me. I walk down my block in Hillhurst near the river with migrating birds overhead, I stroll under poplar branches to the century-old house with the white picket fence (no word of a lie) and the stained glass transoms over the front windows, and I cross the threshold, and I am home in a way I have never been anywhere else. How the hell did that happen?

via walrusmagazine.com

On Calgary, but many embedded gems about a person's relationship to place, applicable to anywhere.

How to Get to Sesame Street

What ultimately separates my living situation from those of the characters on Sesame Street is its impermanence. Television shows are often accused of simplifying life, creating problems that will all be solved within a half-hour or hour. But the beauty of Sesame Street is its permanence, even in the midst of constant, incremental change. Gordon the schoolteacher has been played by three actors, but he's always lived on the first floor of 123 Sesame Street. Hooper's Store isn't run by Mr. Hooper anymore, since the actor who played him died, and the store itself has changed from a soda fountain into more of a bodega, but it's still called Hooper's Store, and it's still just down the street from 123.

My own private Sesame Street won't last. My life, and that of my friends, is deracinated. We don't live near our families, we're ready to move at any time for reasons of business or pleasure, and we're unlikely to build up the dense weave of long-term neighborhood relationships over decades. I may end up moving temporarily to New York. When, and if, I come back, someone else will most likely be living in my apartment. Pamela and Taj, who run the building and are mostly responsible for its current atmosphere, are moving to Charlotte, North Carolina when Taj's employer leaves Seattle. The stores may all change their names and wares at any time.

I hold out hope that, since I've found it once, I can find Sesame Street again, here or elsewhere. I'd still like to live in a place where a brownstone like 123 is affordable (which becomes harder to find all the time). But I'm learning not to require perfection of form, not to think that finding Sesame Street relies on finding its exact architectural equivalent. More important is the web of uses people find for a specific neighborhood; the people in it and what they do.

To find Sesame Street again, I've taken a lesson from the note that precedes the text of Jane Jacobs' sprawling defense of the messy vitality of real urbanism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book has no illustrations; the explanatory note reads, "The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger, and think about what you see."

Sesame Street suffuses her book, even though it was published in 1961, almost a decade before the TV show's debut. And like the illustrations to Death and Life, the program's manifestations are all about us, but not in any literal sense. The Sesame Street of the real American city is built from small details -- my stoop, the connections among my building's tenants, the guy who runs the neighborhood restaurant and waves when I walk by, the paths I take to walk to work, the things we notice as we walk through the neighborhood.

via www.thestranger.com

On the eternal search for Sesame Street. Great, deeply true piece. Many people my age could have written this.

Becoming a Grown-Up City

What D.C. hasn’t yet figured out, or even really planned for, is what happens when this raft of newcomers grows out of one-bedroom condo living. What happens when their lives evolve past the urban-playground stage and they are less interested in speakeasies than in parks for their kids?

Caroline Armijo and her husband joined the wave of new D.C. residents when they moved to the 6th Street Flats apartment building in Chinatown in 2005. At the time, so few people lived there that they had to fight to stop the dumpsters from the Chinese restaurants next door from being emptied in the middle of the night. “A lot of the initial issues were just, ‘Don’t pick up the trash at 4 a.m.,’ ” she said.

A few years later, Armijo, now with her infant daughter in tow, attended one of the first meetings of a Penn Quarter parents group. There she met a mother who made her realize that raising her child downtown would involve more challenges than just finding the right school.

“She kind of scared me,” Armijo said. “She said, ‘The first thing that’s going to sort of push you away from downtown is not the schools — not that the schools aren’t bad — but it is that you realize you need a safe place to play.’ ”

Now that her daughter is 3, Armijo said, finding places to take her is a daily struggle; she swings on bike racks like monkey bars, climbs on a sculpture outside the restaurant Zaytinya or runs atop the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial. Armijo and other downtown parents have begun crusading for a neighborhood playground, starting a petition and bringing their requests to the D.C. Council, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and the National Park Service.

Former D.C. mayor Anthony Williams may not have envisioned the importance of something like a playground in Penn Quarter when his administration began sketching ambitious plans for growth, but the demand is a direct result of those plans. Williams set a goal in 2003 of adding 100,000 residents over the next 10 years and developing at least 15,000 new homes.

He was working off of a Brookings Institution report that said by attracting 50,000 well-off single people and couples without school-age children, the District could increase its revenue by $300 million. Williams and his planners laid the groundwork for nearly all the current major real estate projects and for the new condominiums and apartments that continue to rise — faster than anywhere else in the country since the recession began. If you look up and see a crane today, it is probably at work on a project that Williams’s team set in motion.

via www.washingtonpost.com

The next frontiers in any city wishing to hold onto population gains are definitely public services, specifically schools and public transit.

Where No One Has Any Fun

If you took all the clichés about horrible urban design and shoved them into 75 acres, you’d probably end up with something pretty close to Dallas’ Victory Park. A pre-planned billion-dollar collection of imposing hyper-modern monumental structures, high-end chain stores, enormous video screens, expensive restaurants, a sports arena and tons of parking, completely isolated from the rest of the city by a pair of freeways, Victory Park is like the schizophrenic dream of some power-hungry capitalist technocrat.

Or in this case, his son’s. The — neighborhood? development? — was built by Ross Perot Jr. as an “urban lifestyle destination.” But what it really is is an entertainment district: that swath of cityscape whose character has been preordained by a city council vote and is now identified by brightly colored banners affixed to lampposts. (The entertainment district’s close cousin, the arts district, is often lurking somewhere nearby.)

What could be wrong with a district where nightclubs and galleries are encouraged to thrive? Nothing, necessarily; done right, a city can help foster these scenes with a gentle guiding hand. Constructing an entire milieu from whole cloth, however, is where cities get into trouble. “The problem with these created-overnight districts is that you’re trying to create a culture as opposed to letting one grow,” says Nathaniel Hood, a Minneapolis-based transportation planner. “You’re getting the culture that one developer or city council member thinks the city needs, as opposed to the ground-up culture that comes from multiple players.”

Victory Park is an extreme example, hyper-planned right down to the performances to be held at its American Airlines Center. (“A U2 concert is fabulous,” Perot told the Wall Street Journal. “KISS, not so good.”) But the Dallas Arts District, though less micro-managed, has struggled with its identity as well. Conceived in the 1970s by design consultants in faraway Boston, it relocated the city’s arts institutions to the northeast corner of downtown. Another planning consultancy drew the boundaries of the district, and one by one, the city’s cultural icons were moved there. Today, it contains the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Winspear Opera House. It’s home to buildings by Renzo Piano, I.M. Pei, Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster. In fact, you’ll find everything in the Dallas Arts District except a lot of people, says Patrick Kennedy, owner of the Space Between Design Studio and the blog Walkable DFW.

“A district inherently becomes a single-use idea,” says Kennedy. “Everything has to be ‘art.’ You end up with a bunch of performing arts spaces and when they’re not in use it becomes a vacuum.” This vacuum has made the district itself a museum of sorts, something impressive to observe but strangely inert. (The Chicago Tribune called the area “the dullest arts district money can buy.”) It has few apartment buildings; one is the new Museum Tower, a 42-story condo residence that, as of last month, had sold only 16 of its 102 units. The Museum Tower recently made news when its glass facade began reflecting 103-degree sunlight directly into the Nasher Sculpture Center next door. Now the tower’s developers and the Sculpture Center are embroiled in a fight over which party should alter its building — essentially, arguing over whether art or residents should reign supreme in the Dallas Arts District.

via www.salon.com

Quality of Life = Opportunity

Susan Messier’s career in television journalism took her to such places as Bluefield, West Virginia, and Erie, Pennsylvania. There were also stops in western Texas and, most recently, Fort Wayne, Indiana. Although she and her husband, Jon, established themselves in each TV market, they also continued to seek out a community in which to put down permanent roots.

“We wanted to find the right fit,” she says.

After a year of research, the Messiers moved into a new home in the South Hill area of Eastern Pierce County. The location was convenient to Susan’s new job at Puyallup’s Good Samaritan Hospital, where she is manager of media relations and publications. Jon Messier is a freelance videographer in the area.

“We’ve always moved because of our jobs,” Susan Messier says, “but this time we moved our jobs around where we wanted to live.”

via livability.com