URBAN PLANNING

TRANSPORTATION 

More on my current readings on urban planning. Writer and planner Lewis Mumford once observed that transportation is simply a tool. It can be used to transfer goods from the farm or manufacturer to seller to buyer. It can be used to connect areas of commerce and trade and to connect cities for mutual benefit. It can be used for leisure, entertainment, and education.

Not so much these days

These days it is used to a great extent to support the exponential growth of entities that profit from its existence, primarily the automobile industry and the businesses that profit from highway and bridge construction or the production of fossil fuels.

It allows parents to choose the type children with whom their children will attend school.

It provides frontage and access for business, no longer neighborhood ones but city and regionally oriented chains and mega-facilities.

It is now a winding, slithering monster that controls our lives with scant regard for serving the overall public good.

Swinging Pendulums of History

I’m sorry, but when you badmouth our cities, you get on the fighting side of me. If a person had nothing more to do, no real sustaining joy in life except to make certain people feel bad about themselves, they traditionally went to the coffee shop a’mornings or became editorial writers for right-wing newspapers. Nobody paid much critical attention to them in any case.

Nowadays, though, Facebook and Twitter form the modern coffee shop, and it’s harder to ignore them. Additionally, nobody, not one person I ever met, not a single one, ever, in my life, suggested that anyone pay the least attention to what anyone, in any coffee shop in America, said.

It’s different with so-called “social media.” It is a form of media to be sure, but it ain’t social. I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone really mean-spirited, with nefarious intent, and with some degree of standing, started posting on one of those outlets? People believe that stuff. Holy mackerel.

Which brings me back to cities. I’ve studied them for nearly 50 years, at times in great detail. Here is my opinion, repeat, my opinion, based on my education, experience, and expertise, (attorney friends taught me that disclaimer). In many, if not most cases, the successes or failures of cities bear little relation to the actions of their leaders.

Lots of it derives from pure luck. For example, when I first attended college just after the Permian Extinction, the richest kids in school were from farm communities in south Arkansas. I attended school, by the way, in a remote, impoverished area described by famous architect Edward D. Stone, as “a hotbed of tranquility.” Only two short generations before me, the last leg on the way there required a stagecoach ride. Getting there when I went was only marginally easier. It was a long way from those rich Delta towns.

What occurred in these areas, and others, since my time? Success on the one hand, and failure, on the other, just happened. That’s all.

Nobody voted to mechanize farming operations, reducing the working, and supporting population, of those farming communities by over 80 percent.

Nobody voted to remove African-Americans from a community after discovering a lingering and smoldering volcano of racial bigotry still extant below the communities of America.

Nobody voted to make industrial labor so much cheaper in Third World countries than in America.

Nobody voted to make an Interstate Highway closer to, or farther from, their city.

Nobody voted to make drug-usage and drug-selling attractive and profitable, though entwined with criminal behavior, by declaring a “war” on it as we once did alcohol.

No …, no community leader usually votes for success or failure in our cities. (I say “usually’ because there was that Federal Express thing, and there was resistance to retraining farm workers for the Industrial Age. Does the term “coal workers” ring a more modern bell?) Mostly, municipal leaders just hang on in the face of impending doom or unexpected success, a success, by the way, that carries its own seeds of destruction, as someone once said.

So, when I heard that the leader of one of the two ruling political parties in America had, on behalf of his party, delivered an official statement regarding one of our country’s major, but distressed cities, I smiled and assumed that leader would offer words of sympathy, succor, and support. We need healing words so desperately these days.

No.

Now, I’m half nauseated, half pissed off, and totally ashamed of what the country—to which I gave four years of my life in service—has become.

It would be best not to speak of it to me, today. I plan to be busy trying to help some of our cities survive. Someone must.

And love. Not hate.

Day off …

Off yesterday earning. Spent the day in Searcy, AR. Some agitation there over two students finding a body in a thickly wooded area next to a school. They think the body may been there as long as two years.

I've no doubt the police will figure it all out. They have a fine department there and the Mayor is a former Police Chief. Most of us don't realize how lucky we are to have folks who look after our safety. I'm not sure we always treat them fairly. We give them less than a second to make a life-altering situation and then spend six months debating as to whether they did it right. I dunno.

I sat in the patio at the Lonoke house yesterday and watched a crew installing new sewer pipes. I'm not sure we all understand what happens when we flush our toilets. We take so much for granted and if it doesn't appear on our little cell phone screen, we lose interest.

Heard an elected official the other day say he was going to vote against a badly needed project. He thought it was a good idea, and that his cities needed it badly. But he had decided it was a "new tax" and he had promised Grover Norquist  that he would never vote for anything that involved taxes.

Say what?

I wish we still taught Civics in school and that there was a universal draft for young folks in America.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Six

Back at work, I spent spare time during lunch break watching Capitol Avenue. Something was going on. Something bad. Really bad.

Each day at noon, there was a show going on at the intersection of Capitol and Main streets. I finally asked someone what was happening.

“Preparing to save Downtown,” someone said.

“Getting ready to make Main and Broadway into a downtown mall,” another said.

Had I been a prophet, had power, and had courage to act, perhaps I could have stopped them, but I doubt it. Americans are a hard-headed bunch at times. They believed in “downtown malls,” And American cities all over, including Little Rock, were about to make one of the biggest mistakes in the history of urban planning.

Downtowns across the country experienced many problems back then. We blamed their decline on all sorts of issues, mainly centered around the idiotic presumption that malls were the main problem, and by using what Sir James Frazer called, “Imitative Magic,” the solution would prove simple.

Yeah, I know. It was like the bull entering the bull ring, going into “analysis mode,” concluding that his main problem is the red cape, and making what he thinks is the right decision. As we all know from the first, the red cape wasn’t his problem after all.

In the happy, happy Land of Hindsight and Retrospection, the main enemy in the fall of the central business as the primary retail center of commerce may have been something as simple as the Law of Gravity, and its antithesis.

That’s what formed downtowns in the first place: gravity. With townsfolk relying on travel by foot, public transportation, and slow-moving wagons, there was a great motivation to concentrate commercial activity in as small a place as possible, often around the train station or the intersection of other major traffic arteries.

The actual shops for the conduct of retail crammed themselves into an even smaller area, as near as possible to the “100 percent corner.” That would be at Capitol and Main in Little Rock. Cities located the warehousing of goods for the shops a short distance away in an area set aside for the purpose. In fact, one of the first zoning attempts involved the desire to prevent New York City’s garment district from getting too close to the ritzy shops and high-class clientele concentrated in the city center.

All worked fine until the automobile became a staple of the American family, and General Motors began buying public transit systems throughout the country and either closing them down or allowing them to deteriorate into such a state of filth and unsightliness that an unremovable stigma clings, in America, until this day, upon their use.

Then, “anti-gravity,” what we sometimes call “centrifugal force,” took over. Why should retail costumers fight their way all the way to Downtown when they could jump in the family car, drive a short distance, and buy things? The things they bought would become increasingly cheaper as national firms cornered what had been a free-market retail phenomenon in so many ways. As residential suburbs proliferated, centrifugal force slung retail businesses out toward them, away from Downtown.

At any rate, the future of Downtown as the dominant retail center faced inevitable doom. Turning it into a mall with few customers, and little of the necessary parking required, wasn’t going to change that. If a city didn’t have a suburban mall, a neighboring city did. We wept and wailed, and threw money at the issue. It didn’t work. Shopping centers and strip-centers ruled commerce, and the subterranean monsters we now call “big-boxes” hadn’t even yet been released from their noxious lairs.

The big-boxes would later take care of neighborhood businesses and now face their own “economic matadors,” but those are stories for another day.

Downtowns would have to evolve in order to survive. Given the vast number of Americans who refuse to accept the realities of natural evolution, it’s not surprising how many would refuse to accept a concept involving urban evolution. As I say, Americans are a stubborn folk, clinging to images in crumbling stones .

The evolution of the central business district was a solution that would grow into an inspiration only in recent times. During the interim, many downtowns would crumble and fall, despite the benign, but devasting, efforts of a long line of urban planners and urban designers who yearned for immortality,

Back in the day, I stared through the window at Capitol Avenue and was quite willing to play my part in the carnage.

Somehow,  central cities survive
our best efforts to destroy them.

Morning Thoughts: January 11, 2018

When I was just a young boy, I grew up "out in the country." What I wanted then, was to grow up and have a place in a big city like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo had. Almost made it. The road to my dream got a little bumpy, though, when I married a farmer's daughter.

Now we have what we call "a farm," which is really just a 125-acre patch of pastures and forest. We do have a high-rise condo unit in Little Rock, a not-so-big city but a nice one. We recently bought another house in a small town: Lonoke, AR in which to care for my mother-in-law. That's another nice city. Now we, like the hero (heroine?) in our favorite movie says, "We don't know where we are until we hear someone call our name."

Let's face it. I like cities. I don't mind farms, grew up around them, but I love cities.

That's why I keep working some. See, I get to work for the cities of Arkansas and that is both a treat and an honor.

So, I'm in Fort Smith, Arkansas today, it's another nice city, the one from where Mattie and Rooster took off to find her daddy's murderer.

I'll get to spend time with exceptionally fine people, swap war stories, and learn things. Go ahead and envy me. I'll understand.

Morning Thoughts: November 28, 2017

Talked cities most of yesterday. Woke up in one of the great ones this morning. All in all, having a splendiferous time. Storm clouds threaten, though.

As elected officials in our nation’s capital and our statehouses become increasingly frivolous and irresponsible, those in our nation’s cities are buckling up for the crises ahead. They are even taking on the opioid epidemic while others quake in fear of big pharma. There may be lawsuits, and there surely will be blood. As Margo Channing said, “Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.”

I would just say that before you curse or denigrate your mayor, consider that she may be the last bulwark between you and Gotterdammerung. Consider the current problems she faces: wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, vacant retail buildings gone to Amazon, and mega-rich families hoping to end their public-school systems. She also sees more serious ones of the potential variety:

- A two front war that would require a draft of most entry level workers and most, if not all, of our federal budget, (Who’ll serve us Big Macs? How would we get to them or pay for them)?

- A day when practically all public resources not allocated for war will be allocated to serve the automobile and simple walking is impossible,

- A Brave New World environment in which public contentment will be determined by mind-controlling pharmaceuticals, and

- Our downtowns, once the heart and souls of our communities, laid waste and bare, save for vacant concrete slabs where we once met and knew one another, and
- Others that we cannot now imagine. After all, we've seen much in the past 11 months that we couldn't have imagined in times gone by.

It’s a bleak and possible future no doubt, one whose problems won’t be solved in Washington or, heaven knows, in our state capitals. So far, we do elect good people to our city halls. Here’s hoping we continue to do so.

A beautiful city, and may she always be.