Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

Living in Lego City

Ever see that huge LEGO CITY section at Toys R Us? How does it stack up in the eyes of city planning theorists? 

Safety is a watchword in Lego City. The Mobile Police Unit is ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice, should the Police Helicopter spot any illegal activities. It is hard to believe that any thieves could cross into Lego City, knowing the Forest Police Station is fully operational. And if the police, with their own helicopter and Jeep and a built-in holding cell, don’t catch the criminals, the bear (included) will. 

Read the rest at: Living in Lego City

Road Widening: Contemporary Blood-Letting

 

ABOVE: Rawson Avenue - non-vehicles beware. Subdivisons full of children who attend a nearby elementary school face this barrier.

 

After decades of catering to cars and the people able to drive them at the expense of people who cannot or chose not to drive (Rawson Avenue in Franklin, WI is a living monument to that vision), city planners and transportation officials are finally (slowly) starting to see the value in making communities accessable to all. However, it isn't going to be easy to convince the public at large that we needn't provide the means to travel at 60 mph through residential areas:

We have been so thorough in making cars happy for the past several decades that much of our world is designed in such a way that it is impossible to travel without a car.

Tragically, convenient, easy car travel we have bankrupted ourselves in creating is not conducive to creating safe, lovable, human-oriented, sustainable, enjoyable places that induce civic pride (indeed, it is utterly destructive of a better place to live). Those of us who have discovered this, then, are stuck with the enormous task of trying to point out that the path to a better community – to a better future – lies in doing something that at least initially, seems harmful to our happiness: inconveniencing car travel and car parking (and making car use more costly)

Read the rest at: Road Widening: Contemporary Blood-Letting | Dom’s Plan B Blog

10 years later, the sad lesson of the Segway: The suburbs killed your rocket-pack

“Instead of becoming the next Bill Gates or Henry Ford, Kamen might find himself ending up like another great American inventor, Preston Tucker, who in the 1940s built the Tucker, a car too far ahead of its time.”

I think the explanation is far simpler. The Segway revealed what we in the suburbs are getting to know more and more: You cannot walk or bike from any place of significance to any other place of significance in most modern areas of human habitation.

In a world largely created for cars, a conveyance like the Segway is nothing but a toy.

Ten years on, and I've neither ridden one nor seen one at use "in the wild" by anyone other than a mall cop or city tourist.

 

Read the rest at: » A Segway anniversary JIMROMENESKO.COM

"The human body works better when we walk."

The picture above is one I took this morning while out for a walk. While this blog is often where you see horrific examples of asphalt gone wild in the suburbs, anyone who lives in a community like mine can attest to the beautiful stretches of road that exist - - especially at this time of year.

If a person could string together a mile or so of the sort of roadway you see above -- particularly if it creates a useful route from home to a grocery store or cafe, for instance --  it wouldn't be hard to create an opportunity to walk each and every day. However, the majority of my route this morning was along 51st Street, where traffic averages 45-50 mph (it's posted 35 mph) and the "pedestrian lane" is a narrow edge of the roadway deliniated by a white line.

Fortunately, the city is working to continue a sidewalk that runs in front of the high school and currently gets you about 1/5th of the way between Drexel and Rawson. It connects people to the grocer, pharmacy, and convenience store/gas station that are at the corner of 51st and Rawson. Eventually, many people will be able to make a morning or evening walk towards a cup of coffee or a few groceries part of their daily routine.

That's the challenge we face: Connecting roads like the one above to other roads like the one above. That way, walking becomes organic to daily life.   

Why is this important? Watch and listen to the video below (BONUS: This gentleman has an enormously relaxing speaking voice, you'll find). 

Another community taken for a ride by Wal-Mart

Is the death-spiral of the Middle Class still mysterious to people when municipalities PAY to have cash-larded retailers come in to help shutter any and all local businesses?

Wal-Mart throttles South Milwaukee:

The city will spend $800,000 to clean up environmental contamination on the city-owned parcel. The city also will spend up to $1 million on cleanup work on an adjacent 6.5-acre parcel owned by an investment group, led by Briohn Building Corp., that Gatlin is buying.

The city's project costs could total $3.05 million. That amount includes $1.75 million previously spent to acquire and do earlier demolition and cleanup work on its 3.5-acre parcel, minus $500,000 Gatlin will pay South Milwaukee to buy that land.

The Walmart will generate $276,000 in estimated annual property taxes, which will be used to pay off the city's costs, including interest. Once that debt is paid off, the property taxes go to the city, its school district and other local governments.

Do the math. So much for sustainable communities.

Very, very sad.

As Wi-Fi Havens And E-Book Centers, Public Libraries Aren't Going Away Soon | Fast Company

To those equating community libraries to simple warehouses for printed matter whose utility is tied to our dependance upon bound books, some interesting news:

The American Library Association has just published its newest investigation into the state of the nation's public libraries, and the news is...actually rather good. You may think that odd in an era of ubiquitous alternative distractions to reading a real book--from iPads to Kindles--but it's really these new high-tech devices, along with the Internet that's keeping libraries flourishing. The one fly in the ointment is that funding cuts seem to be threatening many services.

While just a few years ago public libraries were all about borrowing books to read, or finding somewhere to study alongside handy text resources, the Net has changed much of this. Now 99.3% of the U.S.'s libraries offer Net access, via a public PC or open Wi-Fi, and 64% of libraries say they're the only free access point in their communities. With that figure stepping up to 73% for rural libraries, and 70% of libraries reporting that public use of their Net facilities increased in 2010, it's easy to see that the public library is still hugely relevant in a digital era.

It seems that [the library's] Internet nexus is extremely handy for people seeking jobs, via vacancy listings and other resources: 88% of libraries offer this, and 72% say their staff are helping clients fill in application forms. Meanwhile, 25% of libraries are in partnerships with government agencies and other groups to build e-government services--almost double the 13% figure from just two years ago. Though we live in a digital era that obviates many reasons to travel, it seems the library still is the social hub for data sharing.

Read the rest at: As Wi-Fi Havens And E-Book Centers, Public Libraries Aren't Going Away Soon | Fast Company

Narrower roads: Less expensive, safer, and more bike/pedestrian friendly

Avert your eyes: The obscenity that is Franklin's 31st Street. At rush hour.

We often hear city officials proclaim their view of the "natural" progression of a road as needing to be BIGGER and WIDER as the years go on. A few years back, aldermen in my city lobbied hard for an obscenely wide road to be built behind the Northwestern Mutual Life headquarters.

After all, went the argument, it'll need to get that big eventually....

This viewpoint is deeply flawed, to say the least, and it's costing our cities an enormous amount of money. We now pay to plow, salt, patch and otherwise and maintain a wide, four-lane road that was laid in front of long-standing houses --- this is where a residential STREET should be --- that gets very, very little traffic per day. Worse, it's only a few yards away from, and parallels, 27th Street, which was supposed to be our high-traffic commercial strip.

People who travel down 31st Street for the first time (most Franklin residents are unaware that it exists) are utterly shocked at its immensity.

No - the smart money is on REDUCING the width of roads and streets. In Minnesota, cities are paring back streets when it comes time to repave them.

A growing number of metro area cities are taking a broader, greener view of street repairs.

Instead of just rebuilding worn roads, cities such as Bloomington, Richfield and St. Paul are narrowing streets to provide space for bike lanes and sidewalks. St. Anthony has added rain basins and retention ditches to filter and re-use runoff for irrigation, officials said.

But despite little additional cost, health and environmental benefits and lower traffic speeds that improve safety, some residents have objected loudly enough to stop their streets from going green.

"They are somewhat controversial when initially proposed in a neighborhood," said Metropolitan Council member Steve Elkins, a former Bloomington council member. "But once they are put in, we have never had a neighborhood ask us to undo the bike lanes."

...

The city website includes a Living Streets Plan manual, estimating that shrinking 30-foot-wide residential streets by 8 feet will save 15 percent in pavement costs, enough to cover the cost of adding rainwater gardens, trees and other green improvements.

The narrower street would cut maintenance expense by about 25 percent, which could save up to $1,000 a mile per year, the manual says. The rain gardens filter runoff before sending it into streams and lakes. More walking and biking instead of driving creates healthier residents and cuts air pollution.

Read the rest at: Cities turn to a new, green path for street designs | StarTribune.com

CNU 19 in Madison

I'm attending the Congress for the New Urbanism gathering in Madison this week, hoping to bring back some ideas (and energy) for Franklin. If we had train service between Madison and Milwaukee, I could be writing blog entries during my trips back and forth to the CNU 19 gathering; as it is, I'll have to catch up in the evenings.

In the meantime, here are some great regularly updated CNU news pages that will keep you on top of the events in Madison as they happen.

CNU Liveblog

The CNU 19 Daily

 

Government 2.0: Citizens take the lead

Look at this nifty and useful Google Calendar implimentation on Greg Kowalski's FRANKLIN TODAY blog:

This is exactly the kind of useful content that a community blog should offer. Bonus feature: If you have a Google Calendar account (and/or iCal on a Mac), you can subscribe to Greg's City of Franklin Calendar and have those events integrated into your own calendar and automatically updated.

That's pretty handy.

The official City of Franklin website has a calendar module as well, and it isn't so bad. It looks like this:

Clicking "View all Events" sends you to a page with a longer list of city events as well as links to agendas and meeting minutes.

I think, however, the city could stand to emulate Kowalski's use of free Google services so citizens can subscribe, for instance, to meetings covering certain TOPICS and ISSUES as well as gathering of specific commissions and committees.

Inching closer to transparency ....

Do We Need Public Libraries? (Enjoy your "Tax Freeze": Part 2)

My post entitled "Enjoy your 'Tax Freeze': Part 1 - A Country Without Libraries" elicited a couple of comments from two local tax freeze advocates (they won't mind me characterizing them that way, I'm sure). Their point seemed to be; "Get into the 21st century - - we have the internet and Kindles now!" I was reminded by both commentors that Ben Franklin would have really dug the Kindle - - after all, he was an inventor.

They miss the point.

To define a library by the technology that delivers words and information is erroneous -- as erroneous as stating (rather elliptically)  "Libraries in schools are already being reduced by digital media. That's the demand."

Libraries (and, more dangerously, LIBRARIANS) in schools are NOT being reduced by digital media. They are being reduced by school boards and school budgets that are defining libraries as little more than "warehouses of bound matter." Schools that have cut librarians in favor of part-time "media specialists" suffer the consequences; I see my own children having to turn to me to learn basic research.

From a 1998 American Prospect article called “Will Libraries Survive?” by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg

In 1998, a Commerce Department study followed that 62 million people are using the Internet, and other estimates put the figure still higher. Most of these… are people who already use the public library less often than their parents did for purposes of obtaining recreational and instructive reading. Now they no longer need to rely on the library even for the sorts of information they can't easily get on National Public Radio or at Barnes & Noble… they may still want to have a library around as an information source of last resort, but they have a number of more convenient options to exhaust before they are driven to use it.

So, in 2011, the library should be dead or dying. But that's not what's happening, for instance, in Chicago. From the book Better Together: Restoring the American Community:

In little more than a decade, Chicago has built 32 neighborhood branch libraries and renovated nine others. the downtown Harold Washington Library Center, opened in 1991, is one of the largest public library buildings in the world. Its green metal roof with huge gargoyle like owls, their wings extravagantly unfurled, make it in unmistakable landmark. 14 more new branches are scheduled to open by 2005. More to the point, the libraries are humming with activity.

In other words, proper attention to public library facilities will make those facilities integral to the community—more than worth the investment made. In an hours-old news clip, you see Illinois continue that commitment:

Sixteen Illinois public libraries will receive construction grants to help pay for essential upgrades planned for this summer.

The grants will go toward projects such as handicapped accessibility, heating, ventilating and air conditioning units, building additions and renovation. Secretary of State and State Librarian Jesse White says many public libraries lack the funds to perform these improvements without grant money.

And why? These urban and suburban libraries provide huge quality-of-life benefits. Irregardless of whether information is delivered via bound matter or iPad, or Kindle, or microfiche, or computer monitor, etc.

So - a commentor says "literature, research, and study are all evolving."

True. So...?

Innovative libraries aren't content serving as one-way conduits of information; they want to foster dialogue and exchange with their users. What does that have to do with whether words appear on paper of an illuminated screen?

As further expressed in the book Better Together: A library is no longer a passive repository of books and information or an outpost of culture, quiet, and a calm in a noisy world. The library of today is—should be—an active and responsive part of the community and an agent of change. In addition, the Internet, which was supposed to wipe out its reason for existence,  is very often cited as one of the things that brings people to the library.

This may come as a surprise to some of our more sheltered subdivision dwellers, but there is a “digital divide” in this country. Believe it or not, there are people who live within blocks of you who do not have access to the Internet, a computer, and certainly not a Kindle. For them, the library provides a window into a world of information we take for granted in our suburban enclaves. And now that the digital divide extends into our suburban enclaves, library access is more important than ever for people seeking employment, information, networking tools, etc.

There are also people who are new to the world of computers and the Internet. Late bloomers. For them, the Franklin public library provides very inexpensive computer classes. At five dollars per class, they are eminently affordable; at the same time, their immense popularity has created a not insignificant chunk of income for the library, which helps perpetuate these services.

Here in Franklin, our library stands as the only non-retail “third place” in existence. That is, the library is the only place you can go with no barrier to entry; a place where you may meet or happen upon virtually anyone.

What is a “third place”? Ray Oldenburg describes  it as a place that is neither work nor home, a place where people can spend time together. The café, the public, the neighborhood tavern, the old-fashioned drugstore with soda fountain are some of the examples he uses. A good third place makes few demands on the people who gather there, beyond requiring them to observe some basic local rules (for instance, that individuals, and especially newcomers, will not dominate the conversation; or that Illinois natives will assert their Bears fandom in moderation while in Wisconsin borders). A third place is a neutral ground where people from different walks of life in the community can meet and get to know one another, having in common perhaps only their desire to frequent this particular place. (More about "third places" here.)

Think of some examples of "third places" in Franklin. It's a very, very short list.

The replacement of local shops by chain stores and implementation of single-use zoning that puts housing, workplaces, and retail establishments in segregated areas have effectively eliminated the “corner drugstores” and the coffee shops where people met one another and found out what was going on in town and in the neighborhood. Television keeps us at home in the evening, when in the past we would've sought one another's company in a third place. The authors of the blog comments which I am addressing here have first-hand knowledge of the political and ideological polarization that is threatening us locally. I attribute a great deal of the blame for the lack of community in suburbs like Franklin to the simple fact that our built environment has made it impossible for those serendipitous chance encounters between persons who have ideological differences that lead to constructive debate and collegial jousting. Instead, we are treated to “bloggers” and anonymous commenters who insult one another's ideas—and assault one another personally—in away they never would if they had actual, real-world interaction with persons outside of their ideological spectrum.

Look at the crowds at Starbucks and other cafés. They attest to the continuing need that people feel for third places. However, those third places have a barrier to entry; that being the fact that you are ostensibly there to purchase three-dollar coffee and maybe a muffin. If you bring a backpack full of notebooks and pencils to Starbucks and simply loiter, you are not living up to your side of the bargain. The demographic is narrowed thusly.

Yes, Benjamin Franklin would have loved the Kindle. But he would be horrified to learn that citizens of his beloved republic are, in the dawning of the 21st century, cocooning themselves in rec rooms and pulling up their McMansion drawbridges against interaction with other people and other ideas. He would be sickened to hear that we are now celebrating "tax freezes" at the expense of those social institutions that have helped us grow as a country over previous generations; the institutions built by our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents to serve us and that were paid for by their taxes, though they knew they would see no personal, immediate benefit.

Can you even imagine that forward-looking ethic today?

Our tax rate is at its lowest in four generations, and yet we whine about contributing to educate our children, plow our roads, keep our infrastructure together, and provide community amenities. Where we used to invest in future generations, we now look to secure our own purses, tomorrow be damned.

Still, one cannot deny that Ben Franklin would have loved the Kindle...