Around the time I stopped keeping this blog, I had begun to organize a grassroots organization called Friends of Spaulding Court. Its mission was to redevelop Spaulding Court in a way that promotes the strength and diversity of the Corktown community. Its lever was Spaulding Court itself, a 100 year old, stone faced, 20 unit townhouse complex bought off the county for $1,000.
In the coming days and weeks, I'll be posting about Spaulding Court, a brief history of the organization, challenges we face, fond memories and visions of the future. Please feel free to comment on this or any posts or write me at jon@spauldingcourt.com.
Friday, November 2, 2012
Introducing Spaulding Court
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Back to blogging
I'm going to start writing again. I've been doing city work in Detroit since the last time I wrote here and I'm looking forward to decompressing a bit. I also realized today that Pretty Good City has been putting up some solid numbers over the years. I hope that the past posts did some good.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Space Shift: The Basis of Good Space
-Part III of a series-
Click here for Part I: A Historical Perspective
Click here for Part II: Technology and Social Change
We've gone through some history of our built space--the how we got to where we are--and the technological drivers that are pushing our society. The question becomes, where are we headed? I would like to start by laying out a series of six benchmarks that any good city should aspire to.
A city should not infringe on the potential for future generations to exist. As a species of individuals that greatly value opportunity for their offspring, it seems obvious that we try to avoid conflicts of interest between opportunity for present individuals future ones. If a child wishes to attend a university several thousand miles away, or if a promotion is offered on the other side of town, the transportation costs to the present individuals are substantial, but they are nothing compared to the costs imposed on future generations through climate change and resource depletion. Our built space should encourage sustainable behavior.
Good built space promotes equality. What can I say about this? We live in America, the country that (claims to have) invented the idea of equality. While I think the rationale for this point is self-evident, any objectors to equality should consider the animosity and conflict that inequality breeds.
Cities are always places of opportunity. Good built space must maintain that opportunity and provide it especially for those working towards the common good. Those looking to take and not give (economically, culturally...etc) should be discouraged by the very built space of a city.
Good built space is pleasant. It looks nice, it smells nice, it sounds nice and it feels nice. How many of the paintings hanging on your walls do you consider ugly? How often do you linger by the tailpipe of an old school bus? Do you consider it a treat to be waken by the banging of pots and pans? Does anyone in downtown Chicago actually appreciate the 50 mph winds that throw grit and garbage into their faces? If unpleasantries can be avoided, they should.
Good built space takes investment, but money is only part of the puzzle. A good city encourages it's citizens to be personally invested in their built space. Money and the people that move it around are a distortion in the system. They have no interest other than an increase in the number of dollars at their disposal. Only the involvement of people just as--or more--interested in the quality of the space than the financial bottom line will result in good built space and the continual improving of it.
Lastly, good built space should encourage individual health, both physical and mental. Our interactions with our build space have an enormous and well documented effect on our physical health. As the last couple generations of social commentators can tell you, our mental health is not immune to the the dehabilitating effects of poor built space. There's no reason that our built space should hurt us.
I highly doubt if any built space has fully attained all of these characteristics, and I doubt if any space ever will. In the next installment, I'll discuss some of the implications that these six targets have for cities.
Update[7/22/09]: I should add that if you take issue with any of these, or feel some additions are required, the comments are wide open.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Space Shift: Technology and Social Change
-Part II of a series-
Click here for Part I: A Historical Perspective
Click here for Part III: The Basis of Good Space
I'd love to be writing about a new generation of Americans that are shrugging off the allure of material goods and making communal decisions that promote the common good--but I'm not that delusional. I tend to believe that while people's mental tendencies change very slowly (generations), the expression of those tendencies can be altered quite rapidly by new technology.
Americans aren't lining up for the Model T or the new washing machine or the house in the suburbs with the white picket fence--they're lining up for the iPhone. They spend their time following each others social interactions on facebook and Myspace and interact in an increasingly cluttered world through tiny snippets on Twitter. The internet has brought the world to our fingertips and we've realized that it (the world) is larger than we could have possibly realized.
The internet is incredibly important to understand in the context of the problem it solves and the other solutions that it will displace.
As transportation capacity increased and societies became more mobile around 150 years ago, it became apparent that world was far too complicated for people to be able to make fully informed decisions. Simplifications were seen as increasingly desirable.
Where as before, a single butcher may have served a neighborhood on the basis of personal contact and trust, now, that population had access to a dozen different butchers and judging their relative merit was no easy task. The butchers that advertised the merits of their brand (reality notwithstanding) grew their client base and eventually drove others out of business.
Customers became consumers and personalities became demographics. Instead of a dozen small butcher shops catering to their customers needs, a handful of conglomerates extracted the maximum economic value out of each consumer. Though these conglomerates became increasingly complex to operate, to the consumer, they were a godsend. No more asking neighbors for advise, or buying dubious guides. Instead, wherever you go, that comfortable brand is waiting for you.
Though it's certainly not the only way (see Zagat), the internet casts away the need for extensive sleuthing when it comes to making consumptive decisions. Sites like Yelp cover the entire country with reviews and online product guides like Good Guide will soon be adding features that allow a consumer to scan any product with their phone to bring up detailed information. You certainly don't have time to learn about every single ingredient in the sunscreen you're buying, but someone else does. The internet can tell you all you want to know--without simplification.
The reason I bring all this up is because the re-customerization of consumers is exerting a pressure on society as the technology pushing it moves faster than our society seems willing to move. While one reason for the foot dragging seems financial (I think it will also be solved through the internet) another--arguably more important--is built right into our environment.
Most of our built space was designed for a top down approach to the economy, while the internet is ushering in a new era of massively distributed enterprise. Those places that are currently prospering are those whose built space supports a bottom up sort of economy. More than just offering low barriers to entry, these places bring throngs of people into close contact with one another to stimulate creativity and the growth of culture.
And though the modal choice folks might not yet realize it, the next guiding mantra is: "Bring people together."
Friday, June 26, 2009
Rep. John Mica (R) on Transit
Ranking minority member on the house Transit and Infrastructure Committee, Republican Representative John Mica has an interesting interview with PBS which gives me hope that Republican's may--at least temporarily--support public transit.
Here's Rep. Mica:I became a mass transit fan because it’s so much more cost effective than building a highway. Also, it’s good for energy, it’s good for the environment...seeing the cost of one person in one car. The cost for construction. The cost for the environment. The cost for energy. You can pretty quickly be convinced that there’s got to be a more cost effective way. It’s going to take a little time, but we have to have good projects, they have to make sense – whether it’s high-speed rail or commuter rail or light rail. We got to have some alternatives helping people--even in the rural areas--to get around.
So cars are bad and transit is good? I think his simplification is excessive. Cars are incredibly useful in rural areas and areas with insufficient density to support public transit. As the density of an area grows, the space required by the cars so eats away at the area as a whole that those places are essentially stripped of their comfortable social spaces, leaving isolated enclaves of leisure, work and commerce.
There are places where cars make sense and transit doesn't. There are places where transit makes sense and cars don't. We shouldn't add components to a system that destroy it's performance (economic, social, environmental...).
If Rep. Mica is truly interested in transit, the one sure way to promote it is to provide incentives for projects that don't promote daily automobile use and penalize projects that encourage it.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Space Shift: A Historical Perspective
-Part I of a series-
Click here for Part II: Technology and Social Change
Click here for Part III: The Basis of Good Space
New Urbanists and the like often claim that the suburbs are built for cars, not people. In reality, suburbs were built by people and sold to people. We should be precise about what suburbs are and what they aren't. While they are great places for people to go for a walk or a bike ride, all serious transportation--going from one place to another--requires an automobile.
The hot topic in urban planning circles is "modal choice", the idea that people should be able to choose how they handle their serious transportation needs. Walking, driving, biking, busing or training; in the cities of the future, the choice will be yours.
This poorly thought out idea must be fleshed out before the economy starts whirring again. The climate crisis makes it imperative that we avoid another 50 years of disastrous built space. We're currently seeing the gradual shift of the dominant paradigm away from the vast suburban areas to something quite different. I propose that we mentally skip over the intermediate phases of this shift that are heavily influenced by our current system to see if the premises being adopted by today's society will result in a sustainable future. In the end, I hope it will, but we must throw off the shackles of our current schemes.
Around 100 years ago, the premise that drove the dominant paradigm of urban development rapidly shifted, just as it seems to be shifting today. It seems worthwhile to examine that century old transition and the parallels to what's happening today.
For most of human history, the dominant paradigm of urban development was driven by one simple premise that was shared by most of society: closer is better. This was certainly not a necessity, but instead was based around the idea that cities drove societal and economic growth so their size should be maximized. Since all transportation was slow, functional size could only be achieved with high density. Steel production was impossible during this period so there was a fairly low theoretical limit on the absolute amount of space per given footprint. A handful of the densest of these places still exist and function at densities well over 100,000 people per square mile (150 people/acre).
The early 20th century brought two major technological advances based on plentiful steel--the skyscraper and the automobile. The implications of these technological additions are too big to pass over, I'll first address the skyscraper.
With the advent of the skyscraper, localized densities virtually lost their theoretical limit. While before, perhaps 20 families could share the same door, now that number increased by an order of magnitude and beyond. Strangers would literally come in and out of your front door. The notion of community that had been an integral part of cities from the dawn of time was obliterated. This is why we associate community with "that small town feel" instead of a street bustling with conversation.
More technically, skyscrapers resulted in enormous populations of people being able to live in the smallest (geographical) places. Developers no longer needed to look outward to expand, they could simply build up.
But a younger generation of developers had a different idea entirely. With the advent of the automobile, land on the outskirts of the city could easily be connected to the city itself, allowing residents of those outlaying areas to reap the cultural rewards of city life while inhabiting a countryside villa. And all of this could be done without any serious investment in transit infrastructure, which had been the precursor of successful development. As time went on, engineers discovered better ways to move people in their automobiles (paved streets, signals, lines on the road, highways...etc), extending the area around cities that could be converted to clusters of private villas.
To sell these outlying areas, developers really only had to convince people to two things. First, having to drive to get to most destinations is a good thing and second, that enjoying the culture that another community creates is just as good, or even superior than enjoying the fruits of your own community.
The first sell was easy. Americans jumped at the chance to drive a car; to a person who may or may not have even ridden a house, the automobile was the 19th century equivalent of the jet pack. The second sell was less easy, and indeed, communities persist in the hearts of cities that have been there for generations.
Often times, communities left urban areas en masse to set up anew in the suburbs. These communities often fared poorly. Suburbs, by their very nature, provide a competitive advantage to the import and consumption of culture, not the generation of it. All except the most tight nit suburban communities fell victim to the ravages of corporate America.
To convince people to make these decisions, these developers created a premise that few Americans at the time could resist: "Bigger is better." Bigger lots, bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger garages, bigger appliances...decency knew no limit.
The intense efforts of these early sprawlers shifted the course of American society. By the end of the 20th century, national pizza chains hawk "Chicago style or "New York" style pizza and intense effort is given to the parking provisions of new developments.
Now that it has been taken to it's logical extreme, the grotesqueness of suburban sprawl has spawned a new movement, one that rejects the basic premise upon which it was founded. We'll examine that new movement--and the technology that supports it--in detail in the next installment.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Quick Update
Hannah and I are getting married in a couple weeks, so expect posting to be fairly light, though I will try to get at least one more post out before the big day. I'm starting a series that will attempt to address the emerging trends in urbanism, coherence is the goal!
Stay tuned!
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