Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb

The library discovers Facebook

If you're on Facebook, please become a fan of the Franklin Public Library, our community's most vital - and, arguably, only - public space. It's an easy way to keep up with programs and services offered at the library, a great city resource that we cannot take for granted.

Because we should know better by now: Rehabilitating suburbia

Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com sponsored a REBURBIA Suburban Design competition recently, challenging entrants to reinvent suburbia. Perhaps make crapulent, hostile landscapes (like the one above) more safe, useful, and conducive to community.

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community? It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!

Clearly, wholesale razing of asphalt-moated structures is not practical, so solutions that rehabilitate the mistakes of the past are especially intriguing. Hence, "Reburbia."

A series of before and after drawings by Galina Tahchieva immediately caught my eye. The restaurant pad below should be very familiar to residents of Franklin and surrounding communities. Unfortunately, the "new" Golden Corral restaurant slated for 27th Street - yes, the 27th Street for which the city has expensively established "design standards" - looks almost exactly like the "before" picture below. I guess we'll fix it later.

This set of simple infill techniques represents a sprawl repair toolkit to retrofit the 5 building prototypes that define Suburbia. These iconic detached structures and their parcels, via modest interventions, have the potential to contribute to a more diverse, cohesive urban fabric within a walkable and identifiable public realm.

Rather than being demolished, these existing buildings are re-purposed and/or lined with new structures using renewable technologies and energy-efficient practices, often taking advantage of Suburbia’s typically excessive setbacks and parking lots.

A drive-through restaurant pad becomes part of a main street, but largely concealed from it, with perimeter liner buildings added along the edges of its parking lot. A strip center is converted into a recycling center with a green roof and 2 side-wings with solar panels framing a courtyard that reaches to the sidewalk. A gas station remains in place while growing a two-story corner store-office extension at a busy intersection to help screen it. A suburban ranch house is permitted to utilize its deep front yard to add a wing with additional bedrooms, a home office, or a rental outbuilding that creates a courtyard with the existing home and defines a livelier street frontage at the sidewalk. Even the ubiquitous McMansion can be converted into senior housing when a five-bedroom/ three-car garage home yields a 10 room-9 bathroom facility for seniors and a caretaker.

See the other 4 building types at Urban Sprawl Repair Kit: Repairing The Urban Fabric « ReBurbia.

The Story of Sprawl 2-DVD set | Planetizen

From Planetizen (visit their site for three sample clips):

In planning circles, it is fashionable to debate the merits or drawbacks of the spread of suburban living that happened in the 20th century. What isn’t up for debate is that it happened- that from the early '40s until the beginning of the 21st century, the American pattern of development changed radically.

This 2-disc set is an unprecedented visual document of how sprawl happened, told through a series of historic films ranging from 1939's The City, created by famed planner Lewis Mumford, to No Time For Ugliness from 1965, produced by the American Institute of Architects.

To get a modern perspective on what these films represent, we’ve recorded commentary tracks for each video with noted planners and authors. You can watch the films on their own, or with the voice of a noted expert guiding you through, including:

• Prof. Robert Cervero, UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design
• Duncan Crary of the KunstlerCast
• Andrés Duany, DPZ Associates
• Anthony Flint, author of The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America.
• Jacky Grimshaw, The Center for Neighborhood Technology
• James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere
• Prof. Jackie Leavitt, UCLA's Dept. of Urban Planning.
• Prof. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, UCLA's Dept. of Urban Planning.
• John Norquist, President of the Congress for New Urbanism.
• Neal Pierce, Citistates Group.
• Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, DPZ Associates.
• Mark D. Van Ells, author of To Hear Only Thunder Again: America's World War II Veterans Come Home.

The Story of Sprawl 2-DVD set | Planetizen.

See a street become sane and safe right before your eyes

This is just a great look at how streets CAN be once we start changing bad habits. Be sure to click the interactive graphic here (photo above is a screenshot).

It’s easy to forget that our streets are alterable. They weren’t set down by God on the eighth day; they were designed by human beings. Unfortunately, throughout the 20th century, most of the human beings designing our streets were traffic engineers. For the most part, they viewed the city from behind a windshield and saw the street as a problem to be solved for automobiles. The result is the American city that most of us know today: sprawling, traffic-choked, hostile to pedestrians and cyclists, dependent on a vast, never-ending flow of cheap oil, and deeply unsustainable.

(Via GOOD Magazine)

Franklin's 51st Street stimulus issue gets national forum: We're being watched

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Community leaders and activists nation-wide will be following the progress of Franklin's stimulus application process and its consequences via the StreetsBlog Network.

In other words: If we screw this up, we screw this up for all to see.

Our situation has resonance across the country; the very real danger of sprawl-as-usual projects being rammed through with stimulus funds has to be confronted early in the process. The Surface Transportation program and many other federal programs are already available and being used by some savvy communities to create complete streets. Road infrastructure projects that help create complete streets through new construction or retrofit - - both being the sorts of projects that employ many engineers and laborers, one of the primary goals of the stimulus program - - should be a high priority for stimulus-funded work.

Our story is already spreading - see also The Infrastructuralist: New Bill in Congress Would Improve America's Streets, Neighborhoods.  (From the story: The Complete Streets Act of 2009 was introduced on Wednesday by Doris Matsui (D - CA) in the House of Representatives as HR 1443 and was scheduled to be introduced yesterday in the Senate by Tom Harkin (D-IA). The bills would require states and Metropolitan Planning Organizations to adopt Complete Streets policies to ensure that future federally-funded road projects take into account the needs of everyone using the corridor.)

Ongoing ...

Visualizing the Growth of Target, 1962-2008 | FlowingData

 

FLOWING DATA previously did the same sort of map showing WAL-MART's growth across the country. It's strangely hypnotic.

Visualizing the Growth of Target, 1962-2008 | FlowingData: — A FLOWINGDATA PROJECT — The first Target opened in 1962 in Roseville, Minnesota, and by 1972 there were 46. The corporation focused mostly on expansion in the Central United States for the next decade, but in 1982, Target acquired 33 FedMart stores in Arizona, California, and Texas. There are now over 1,600 stores across the United States.

Digging into TIFs

A perfect storm of holiday travel, remodeling, and deadline glut has precluded me from posting recently. In the meantime, check out Fred Keller's multipart series on the strange, mostly-misunderstood world of TIF (Tax Incremental Finance [or Funding]) Districts.

It'll surely be a platform for further discussion and exploration.

The Town That Neil Young Built

This comes via Strange Maps:

332 - The Town That Neil Young Built:

Each year around November 12th, whenever their schedules allow for a collective weekend off, a dozen not-so-young urban professionals leave the comfort of their city homes to sample the rugged charm of a remote log cabin. In the backwoods, the men (it is an all-male fellowship) don flannel shirts of the type favoured by Neil Young, and play his music non-stop. Thus, they celebrate Young’s birthday — and also by drinking a lot of beer, and by behaving like the uncouth backwoodsmen that any group of men eventually revert to when collectively removed from their womenfolk.

Christof Rutten is one of those men, recently returned from the latest of those outings. He sends in this map, culled from the latter part of Young’s weird, erratic oeuvre. Young has produced some of rock ‘n roll’s most emblematic anthems and ballads, but has also ventured down experimental avenues never explored before, or since, and all the better for it. Young tried his hand at rockabilly after its heyday, and electronic music before it was fashionable. He also penned a rock opera (or “concept album”, to use an even more suspect term).

Greendale, released in 2003 by the transplanted Canadian (Young lives in LA) is about life in a fictitious Californian coastal town as seen through the prism of the Green family. The songs on Greendale deal with some of Young’s favourite themes — war (and anti-war protest in general), environmentalism, social ostracism, violent crime and all of their social consequences. Greendale focuses on an ageing patriarch (also a pioneer and hippie) his son Earl (an artist and Vietnam vet), granddaughter Sun (environmental activist), and the spiel kickstarts when ne’er-do-well Jed kills a policeman.

The story, amplified by a dvd and a very extended booklet included in the packaging, echoes the energetic political activism of the Sixties — or tries to, and possibly fails (depending on how big a fan you are). The album cover for Greendale is a map of the fictional town, showing how its centre hugs the Californian coast (the outskirts continue on the back of the album). On the album’s very own website, you can scroll over the map to enlarge certain details relevant to the songs (*):

• Captain John Green’s boat (left of the left hand pier);
• Jed’s seafish apartment (to the right of the boat);
• Scene of the crime (on the far left, where the road that dissects Greendale enters the map);
• Carmichael’s house (between the road and the ocean, near the centre of the map);
• John Lee’s bar, Greendale Mortuary (scene of Carmichael’s service), Sun’s room at rooming house (scene of FBI raid), Greendale High School, Motel (all near the ocean, between the pier and the far right of the map);
• Double ‘E’ Ranch (in the bottom left corner of the map);
• Jail, grandma and grandpa’s house, gallery (all below the main road, near the center of town).

In keeping with Young’s  abrasive, anti-commercial image, the map does not link to a place where you can buy the album. It merely states: This town is now available.

Many thanks to Mr Rutten for sending in this map; does anybody have it in a higher resolution? Also, any extra information on the map’s (and the album’s) back story is more than welcome.

*: this album cover spans only the western end of town; the website covers double as much ground. 

The End of the Bake Sale

Sometimes good intentions don't allow you to have your cake and eat it, too.

Governing.com: 13th Floor: The End of the Bake Sale:

posted by Zach Patton

Bakesale When I was growing up, bake sales were a fact of life for school, sports teams, academic clubs, whatever.

There was even one especially memorable bake sale in high school, when I served as co-chair of the cafeteria committee (yeah, I said it -- and I was proud of it.  I got those kids a pizza cart, a jukebox, and outdoor patio seating), and the cafeteria ladies allowed us to use their wholesale ingredients (which, given that it was a public school, may have been just a little bit illegal, now that I think about it) to make breads and cakes and what have you, and we sold them in front of the Wal-Mart and made several hundred dollars in just a few hours, and we donated it all to a shelter for abused women and children.

Anywho...

Right, bake sales.  Big deal.

But not in California, not anymore.  State regulations now strictly limit what foods can be sold to students. And the hallowed bake sale -- and its verboten, obesity-inducing carbs -- is falling out of favor:

The old-fashioned school bake sale, once as American as apple pie, is fast becoming obsolete in California, a result of strict new state nutrition standards for public schools that regulate the types of food that can be sold to students. The guidelines were passed by lawmakers in 2005 and took effect in July 2007. They require that snacks sold during the school day contain no more than 35 percent sugar by weight and derive no more than 35 percent of their calories from fat and no more than 10 percent of their calories from saturated fat.

School clubs are could still sell to non-students off campus. But they're being hit hard.

Maybe they should start having a broccoli sale?

(Via Governing.com: 13th Floor):

Next American City in Milwaukee: Public Transportation Symposium

Next American City in Milwaukee: Public Transportation Symposium:

During the symposium, panelists discussed the pros and cons of improving the public transportation system in Milwaukee. Featuring Rob Henken, president of the Public Policy Forum and Anita Connelly, CEO of the Milwaukee Co. Transit System, as panelists, the symposium is now available to you in full, exclusively on AmericanCity.org.

(Via NAC Daily News and Intelligence.)