What is Urbanism?

Here is a presentation I did last year. I'll go through sometime and make it a bit more self-explanatory.

St. Michaels Boulevard Designs up on City Website

This Spring, RWu+p participated in a sketch design process with the City of Santa Fe to Transform St. Michaels Drive. You can see our boards along with the other participants at the City's website.

Looking Ahead to the Electric Car City

The electric car will make personal mobility cool again, and that's not always a good thing. With renewable power sources, the electric car promises to reduce much of the immediate impact of our automobile culture. But there is more to automobiles than emissions, and it is likely that most of the impacts of sprawl will still be with us in the Jetsonian near future. Personal mobility feeds social and economic segregation, consumption of land, isolated land uses, and excessive road construction.
But there is at least one aspect of the electric car that is good for the growth of sustainable cities, and that is the demise of the filling station. It appears that charging stations will be much simpler and more distributed than gas stations, and certainly the majority of charging will occur at home. It's entirely reasonable to project that the majority of gas stations currently occupying prime crossroads real estate will be out of business in a decade or two. This is an incredible opportunity to reshape environments that today are written off as "automobile dominated".
Every local government should be looking ahead to this eventuality, and devising transition plans for these prominent sites. As cities redevelop corridors, with complete street streetscapes, mixed use development, and transit, they should cast a proprietarial eye at all of those gas stations. They will soon be the lowest hanging fruit in the process of reforming our suburbs.

Ideas from the Mayors Innovation Project

Mayors Innovation Project, Summer 2008 Meeting in Madison, WI

1. Put Pedestrians First
-- put the pedestrian at the center of the city
-- cities exist to maximize exchange
-- provide access rather than mobility

2. Write a Complete Streets Policy for Santa Fe

3. Focus on non-work trips -- 82% of trips

4. Community/ City Hall communication
-- increase transparency to accelerate uptake of new ideas
-- do a website to publicize issues and solutions locally
-- start a city policy wiki

5. Street and Development ideas
-- Road diets
-- Car Share
-- decouple parking unit from housing unit
-- bike boulevards
-- cyclovia/ sunday parkways
-- bike racks
-- bike boxes

6. one card gets you onto buses, trains, carshare, bike share, and locals care

7. Mapping neighborhoods
-- map existing use trails
-- create a citywide Greenways Plan
-- draw 20-minute walkshed neighborhoods around parks and schools
-- map access to food in neighborhood mapping process

8. Plan for bikes
-- "make biking an integral part of daily life in Santa Fe"
-- convene a broad group of stakeholders,not just bike advocates, and include public health and minority communities
-- use Vehicle Miles Travelled as primary measure -- Boulder is holding steady since 1994.

9. Promote community development, not just development of separate systems
-- bike routes and green ways strengthen social capital
-- Door-to-door transportation advising to residents
-- Driving less puts cash and time back into communities
-- community building happens in community gardens

10. Equitable Development--allows residents to shape and benefit from gentrification
-- revitalize neighborhood
-- protect housing stock
-- mitigate displacement
-- build resident incomes and wealth
-- include social dimension--quality of life issues, jobs

11. match gentrification strategies to the market changes you are addressing
-- land banking is an early strategy, inclusionary zoning is a late strategy

12. Support Green Jobs programs -- the "Green New Deal"

13. Build on existing cultural and historic values and assets (Angelou report captures this well)

14. City needs to support businesses, not just build physical infrastructure
-- for new entrepreneurs, capital is not the primary issue--deal with other capacity issues first
-- benefits packages, IDA's, law clinic,technology partnerships, criminal record cleanups and other programss for entrpreneurs and employees

15. Build academics into all alternative programs for kids -- garden programs, etc.

16. Community gardens
-- Reduce public safety issues by using vacant lands
-- Market gardens help support immigrants with agricultural skills

BALLE 2008 from A to Z

Business Alliance for a Local, Livable Economy, 2008 Conference, Boston MA
New Ideas

1. Glocal: act locally, but also do business with local- and green-focused businesses in other places when a service or product isn’t available here. Go to the global supply chain as a last resort.

2. B-Corportation: a new form of corporation that defines social and environmental objectives, and protects those values as the company grows.

3. Aggregated Demand: organize smaller buyers into a purchasing block that can specify your product and buy it in quantity. Also, write purchasing specifications to help larger buyers move to a local product.

4. Working landscape certificates: certifications for small farms to distinguish their products and show their community-benefit mission.

5. Shorten the work week: working fewer hours improves productivity and efficiency, and reduces our carbon footprint by leaving time for workers to satisfy needs directly, instead of through buying processed products.

6. Triple-bottom-line is going mainstream: business, environmental, and social issues are coming together in a common vision of sustainable community.

Business strategies

7. Mission-based balance sheet: If your business is mission-based, build a balance sheet that lets you measure you success in social, environmental and economic terms.

8. Branding -- make sure your brand strategy is scaled to your local context. Most mainstream branding strategies are too big and are all about endless expansion.

9. Collective purchase agreements: Form a buying group to get better prices on common staples.

10. Succession Plan: business owners should start planning now for a smooth succession to your company’s future owners.

Manufacturing Strategies

11. Create a regionally integrated manufacturing plan to replace a global supply chain product with a local product.

12. Develop a deep relationship with one supplier for each product.

13. Create a forum to identify waste streams from business to business

14. Collocate smaller enterprises that use a common waste stream, or that use each other’s waste streams

Employees

15. Help each employee create their own economic dashboard - a strategic plan for their economic goals.

16. Employee Ownership -- is often a good fit with local, triple-bottom-line businesses.

Alliance Strategies

17. Recruitment of new and struggling businesses -- B to B mentoring and direct revenue enhancing services are the most important to stressed business owners.

18. Create a products directory, including products available locally, and a pipeline of products that are coming soon, or should be developed.

19. Loyalty card programs -- create a toolbar to guide internet searches to local suppliers. Link the card to bus passes.

20. Green Business Assistance: create a program that helps businesses go greener. The process should include assessment, recommendations, an action plan, and follow-up support.

21. Austin Orientation: create a program to introduce new residents to local resources. Don’t leave it to the big-boxes to welcome newcomers.

22. Food cycle leakage study: the Puget Sound has completed a careful study of economic leakage in the food cycle.

23. Create a eco-industrial park, or an eco-industrial partnership

Government

24. Create a 'social prosperity framework' that defines triple-bottom-line objectives for the city (or state)

25. Create a local standard for 'sustainable competitiveness' -- raise the bar on social and environmental issues, and make it apply fairly to all businesses

26. The Green New Deal: leaders in struggling communities are calling for a sustained investment in green jobs.

Digital History Project Launched

For a reading copy visit www.santafedhp.airset.com

Paul Hawken, from Blessed Unrest

" You can try to determine the future, or you can try to create conditions for a healthy future.  To do the former, you must presume to know what the future should be.  To do the latter, you learn to have faith in social outcomes in which citizens feel secure, valued and honored."

Digital History Project

“The best map of a territory is the territory itself.”

The Digital History Project is an on-line space where Santa Feans can help make personal and family histories into community history. It serves as a comprehensive index to Santa Fe’s cultural and historic resources. Visitors and collaborators access and contribute to the index by navigating a 3-D model of our city. Community members, including students, can become collaborators in the project with minimal training
The backbone of the project is an immersive, photorealistic 3-dimensional digital model of Santa Fe. Visitors can navigate along streets and into buildings, and can move through different time periods as they go. Historic photographs, and films, appear as small markers at the original camera location. Selecting a marker pivots the visitors point of view to the view of the original camera, and the visitor can toggle between different decades to make comparisons. Historic records for buildings are referenced to their locations.
The interiors of buildings include immersive panoramas and furnishings from each historical period in the building’s life. A wall of portraits link to biographical records for past residents and significant events that occurred in this location. As in the streetscapes, visitors can move a slider to see the room pass through the decades of its life. Physical artifacts are represented, and link to relevant museum collection records. Historical journal entries are shown for each location, and linked sequentially to form a tour.
The virtual environment would also serve as a geographic index to Santa Fe genealogies, allowing visitors to trace family trees and see where each generation lived. Oral histories, biographies, photo archives, artifacts and artworks, and bibliographies, would all be linked. Visitors would be able to contribute their own historical materials (appropriately marked as to provenance).
Certain locations would also host special exhibits related to occupants or traditional uses of that location. A furniture-makers’ studio might have for instance a special feature on the New Mexico chair, with more in-depth resources and a chair that can morph through the stylistic periods. An artist’s home could have a slide show of their work, with links to museum collections.
Current occupants of each building would have the opportunity to link to their own websites, and to sponsor the content for that area. And contemporary artists could make ‘interventions’ in the city that were only visible in the virtual world.
Based on a specific topic of interest, visitors can plan a guided walk, and access much of the location information from a mobile device. Alternately, visitors with mobile devices can record their path through Santa Fe, and review their walk later with the full resources of the Digital History system. Local guides can give remote or disabled viewers tours via internet.


The Technology
→ virtual worlds
→ digital museums
→ photosynth and photosketch
→ geotagging, geocaching, geography games
→ google earth
→ mechanical turk, google image tagging
→ ancestry.com, wikis
→ metadata and xml databases
→ current local digital media, arts calendar, forums



“The best map of a territory is the territory itself.”
-- with apologies to Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Baudrillard, Alfred Korzybski and Lewis Carroll

A Culture of Difference

Friends:

I hope this finds you in good health and good cheer. I've been thinking about my work, and the work we all do, and want to share some thoughts with you. It seems that now is a good time for us to come together a bit, to focus our work and lives -- our efforts -- on our common enterprise, furthering the art of living well together.

Don't worry, this isn't a pitch for anything. I'm talking about building a common culture, and I am convinced that we are all already working on it, each in our own way. I'm really writing today to affirm that effort and to offer you a bit of time to contemplate how it all fits together.

As people of good will, we are doing our work in ways that sustain the people around us, within the constraints and opportunities life presents us with. I want to lift up and encourage that work, to pause and see it as a common effort, and also to counterbalance feelings of divisiveness and strain. We, people of good will, are the vast majority, and our work, though often hidden or seemingly fragmented, is the basis of the relative prosperity and happiness our communities enjoy.

One of the things that can dishearten us is the false conception that a common culture and cultural diversity are incompatible ideas. Certainly, communities must be based on shared similarities, but I think we all feel that communities also thrive on diversity, difference, and maybe a bit of controversy. Political correctness and diversity are paradigms that suffer from both the low expectations of their creators and from quiet subversion by their detractors. We are all told not to presume that our own culture is dominant, and most of us respectfully acquiesce, but often at the expense of conviviality. I believe we can work around this stalemate and make a common culture -- even as our identifications with sub-cultures deepen and multiply.

I find that my reservations about the current paradigm of 'diversity' mirror those about the older one of 'tolerance'. Compared to the rigor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, say, or the poetry of many mestizo movements, much of the language of diversity sounds like a grade school show-and-tell. The language of tolerance, on the other hand, draws integrity from a relatively intact local culture that feels sure enough of its own value to leave room for other cultures. In a few cases I am able to appreciate the naive or innocent arrogation that this culture is 'central' and the others are 'marginal'; but most of the time the old-fashioned virtues of 'tolerance' are quite eclipsed by its vices -- willful provincialism and triumphalism, dissimulated racism, or the false conscience that is the heritage of colonizers. With these reservations in mind, I believe we must tolerate 'tolerance' even with its hidden constrictions, and we must defend 'diversity' even when it seems terribly saccharine.

But neither speaks clearly about the nature of our differences. They're both framed by ideas of similarity while perpetuating divisions.

The phrase "a culture of difference" is a way of getting around some philosophical dead ends (whose history I'm not going to make you read through here). The awkwardness of the wording, I'm hoping, will help you ease into a new sense of the word difference -- freeing it, if you will, from the pairing "similarities and differences", a pairing that is always dominated and defined by similarity.

Let me expand on what I mean when I talk about difference in this way. I find that consciousness is always consciousness of something outside itself, something other. When we get beyond the various questions of identity we engaged with as adolescents, I think we find ourselves in ever-deepening relationships with the 'other' -- our partners, our work, our communities, passers-by, the exotic stranger, our imagined fears and enemies. All of these relationships deepen because we engage in an open back-and-forth that lets us revise our sense of self in the light of our differences.

When difference and similarity are rebalanced, we can see ourselves midstream in transformation, and release some of the humorless tension of maintaining self identity. And I think it is only in a climate of difference that the deeper shared experience of being human is really visible.

The culture of difference I'm enlisting your help with is a messy thing that seems to involve leaving a lot of doors open, but also involves embracing other people's projects as your own. It means being bolder about your own values and yet simultaneously defending, not just respecting, other people's values. It will certainly involve getting much closer to the people around you, but also taking much braver and lonelier positions. I don't want to over-sell or over-describe the culture of difference, because I'm not in a position to set terms. I'm relying on you to recognize this state in yourself, in the pause as you shift your grip on life's certainties. I'm sure you've seen it recently in relationships and workpaths that went from awkward to comfortable in no time at all (or the reverse!). I hope you're able to recognize this feeling from my odd description, and I hope you'll take the plunge with me into a self-fulfilling prophesy: that we can each renew the feeling in our own way and find ourselves in a common effort.

Now I'll end with a numbered list -- with your indulgence -- four memos for a culture of difference:

1. Avoid reductive thinking. Whether it's applied to your value system or another's, reductive logic will always deaden things. I believe that the mystery of consciousness and the dignity of our lives can't be reduced to materialism or any other 'ism'. In a culture of difference, other people don't simply belong to equivalent, parallel value systems; they are likely to frame and hold their values in entirely different ways.

2. Step aside from the paradigm of scarcity. It's pervasive in our economy and our pop psychology, and it's a dangerous fiction. We all produce a surplus, and it's your right and duty to identify, manage and share yours. In a culture of difference, we don't need to hold identical ration cards.

3. Localize your activities. Localization is a movement away from the idea of a presumptive power, away from the excuse that our choices are controlled or predetermined by external forces. A culture of difference fractures power relationships and lets us more clearly see our oddfellow neighbors and our own capacities.

4. Cultivate humility. I know talking about humility is a contradiction. But I can't find another way to describe the habit of putting other people's concerns first, while risking but sustaining your own needs and momentum. In a culture of difference, the mystery of other people's subjective realities is an endless source of renewal and transformation.

So won't you join me, then, in continuing our work, in celebrating the efforts of others -- even from seemingly opposed value systems -- and in stewarding a messy, vital, local, sustaining and inclusive culture?

Thanks for entertaining these thoughts, and I hope to hear from you if you have the time. Also, please help me pass this on to others who you think would read it.

Roy Wroth
December 2007