1 in 13,208

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The IHT reports that the AP/National Election Pool exit poll is based on a mere 13,208 respondents in just 250 precincts nationwide — one of which was me! (CNN has “poll results”:http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2006/pages/results/states/US/H/00/epolls.2.html for the Midwest House poll, which appears to be what I took.) I was pleased as punch to be able to tell the world that I am “angry” with George W. Bush, the war, etc., etc., and apparently the nation agrees!

Yo mama

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This poem caught my eye at a performance of Shostakovich’s fourteenth symphony this summer. The symphony is a set of eleven symphonic poems, all about death, with the poems sung in Russian by an alternating bass and soprano. Needless to say, it’s a little bit somber. I’d never heard of the Cossacks’ insult before, but I’d say it’s history’s sharpest “yo mama” diss. This particular translation was the one in the Ravinia program.

Réponse des Cosaques Zaporogues au Sultan de Constantinople (The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ Answer to the Sultan of Constantinople) by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by M. Kudinov

You are a hundred times more criminal than Barabbas.
Living as the neighbour of Beelzebub,
you wallow in the most foul vices.
Fed on filth since childhood,
know this you’ll celebrate your Sabbath without us.

Rotten cancer, Salonica’s refuse,
a terrible nightmare which cannot be told,
one-eyed, putrid and noseless,
you were born while your mother
was writhing in fecal spasms.

Evil butcher of Podolye, look:
you are covered in wounds, sores and scabs.
Rump of a horse, snout of a pig,
may all the drugs be found
for you to heal your ills!

Whatever Happened to Modernity?

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Dan Solomon’s “Whatever Happened to Modernity?” plenary (we don’t have keynotes at CNU) is still the most-requested item from CNU XIV. We have a transcript, a PDF slide show, and even a video “available for download”:http://cnunext.org/icharrette/info/sessions.html#926.

bq. Daniel Solomon, co-founder of CNU, will build on the special address by discussing contentious design issues. In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, New Urbanism is pinned in the crossfire of style wars. On one side are jihadists who regard the entire modern world as cultural nihilism; on the other are critics and powerful institutions relentlessly embracing novelty in the name of an historically ordained modernity. Between these extremes, New Urbanism steers an unsteady course, snipped at from all directions.

bq. The situation is made more intractable by the Germanic strain of modernism that infected the teaching of architecture and town planning. However, other, more useful modernist traditions infuse cultural phenomena such as fashion, dance and music with different historiography and different conceptions of the relationship of the tenses: past, present, future, and future perfect.

Latest and greatest Cottage

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USA Weekend reports on the Washington, D.C.-area Katrina Cottage built for this weekend’s “Make A Difference Day”:

bq. The [Katrina Cottage] project is a realization of a group of socially conscious designers, engineers and builders, called the Congress for the New Urbanism. Their goal, in the aftermath of horrific destruction by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, was to provide affordable, dignified housing for the needy not only on the Gulf Coast but in every pocket of the country. The award-winning designs can now be translated to fit any environment.

The cottage concept, as realized by Marianne Cusato, recently won the People’s Choice at the National Design Awards sponsored by Cooper-Hewitt.

By architect Steve Mouzon’s description, the “Katrina Cottage VIII”:http://www.katrinacottages.com/interface/home/i_news.html (column on left) is a big step towards design nirvana (far closer than, say, “the LivingHome”:https://westnorth.com/2006/10/11/ostentatious):
* it can and will expand in eight different directions
* it is visitable by those in wheelchairs and adaptable (can be made fully accessible)
* its energy performance is good, befitting the first Katrina Cottage that will see snow (however infrequently) but also having a high-albedo (non-heat-sink) roof
* “it has more clever space-saving devices than you’ve ever seen”
* its interiors are solid, not veneers, hence low VOCs and with ancillary benefits like absolute flexibility with regard to wall hangings thanks to wood paneling instead of drywall on interior walls
* it has all green materials, including bamboo and slate floors
* it is already in production, built at a new factory in Louisiana
* it is designed for affordability and is sized for humble living
* it also has no garage and is being donated to a low-income family living in transit-rich Silver Spring.

The art of compromise

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Ken Silverstein snagged the cover of the November _Harper’s_ with a strange article titled “Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine.” The article’s not the hatchet job that the title implies, but ends with a paean to these liberal lions:
* John Anderson
* Fred Harris
* William Proxmire
* George McGovern
* Frank Church

Why not throw Eugene V. Debs into the mix? Sure, back in the days of the liberal consensus and the Thirty Glorious Years, outright socialists on Capitol Hill could rail against the oil trusts. Lovely, but what the heck does that have to do with 2006? I’m sorry that Obama isn’t pure enough for you; he wasn’t pure enough for the 1st Congressional district in 2000. (Note to world: the man has actually lost an election.) Boo hoo. Well, Pat Buchanan is ideologically pure, mostly. Let’s rally around him.

Silverstein’s main charge seems to be that Obama has accepted money from corporate lawyers, financial interests, and ethanol interests. Well, Obama is a law professor at Chicago’s top law school, a city where lawyers and financiers have the big money (and where lawyers launder money from their anonymous clients).

Now, I’m “no fan of ethanol subsidies”:https://westnorth.com/2006/02/28/bush-a-peak-oil-convert but, quite simply, elections in downstate Illinois are ethanol lovefests. There’s a whole lotta corn here, as some Eastern elitists might notice if they glanced down from the plane once in a while. The farmers, for better or worse, have tied their fortunes to ADM’s, and what you call “politically courageous” might well be “politically suicidal.”

There’s also an implication that Obama is responsible for the Hastert Highway and for “pork” in the highway bill. No, Hastert is responsible for the Hastert Highway. A Democrat in the Senate could not stop the Republican Speaker of the House from doing whatever he needs to do to get his bill through the House and through a conference committee stacked with Republicans, especially if said Democrat has been urged by the leaders back home (saddled with a ragged, rotting transportation infrastructure) to give Hastert whatever he wants as long as the rest of the region can share in the riches.

Exaggerated?

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bq. the City of Berkeley… will lose one of the best opportunities anywhere for leading the world into a sane and healthy 21st Century… Why would I say something as extravagant as claiming the opportunity is one of the best in the world? Because the world is facing the largest crisis in 65 million years and if the right thing is built there, that particular development would constitute a major and early part in the solution to that crisis.

This sort of self-obsessed hyperbole [from “EcoCity Builders”:http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/about.html%5D, asserting that two acres in California are somehow vastly more crucial towards solving all the world’s problems than the 99.9999999946% of the earth’s land area around it, is one reason why I can’t see myself working in the Bay Area anytime soon. One can easily say that the Berkeley community deserves and demands an environmentally superior solution, that the world faces multiple environmental crises and that new development can help to start to address these crises, etc. However, asserting that you (and/or your pet project) are singularly tasked with changing the future of the world says more about your ego than anything else.

PPS’s public space agenda for NYC

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Sometimes, PPS gets a bit tiresome with its Cosmo-style “Ten Ways to…” ledes, but hey, they seem to draw attention.
Nine Ways to Transform New York into a City of Great Places is different: it’s a genuinely gutsy set of recommendations, starting with:

bq. The highest and best use of New York’s street space is to support pedestrian activity and access.

The article very justly attacks:
* starchitects’ Corbusian indifference to the city beneath their floating glass palaces (compared with the Empire State Building, “so human-scaled at the sidewalk level that people standing in front… stop to ask where it is”);
* the city bureaucracy — schools, small business, culture, health — for sitting in silos, blind to the value that great public spaces could bring to their departments (see the Richard Jackson piece below);
* the reactive, antagonistic, opaque Community Board process, which is effective at neither gathering broad input nor regulating change, and for which blame lies on both the CBs and the developer-city-designer combine for being too afraid of forward planning;
* BIDs for not thinking beyond just picking up trash:

bq. BIDs have proven effective at the basics of maintenance, security, and beautification, but they have yet to explore a broader public role. Small Business Services, the agency that manages their funds, should lead BIDs to form more community partnerships, program their public spaces, and implement streetscape improvements. BIDs themselves would relish the new role. Some are already raring to work with surrounding communities on bold visions for what their public spaces could become–they just need the go-ahead.

180 degrees

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James A. Bacon writes about how a Virginia Beach intersection metamorphed from planners’ laughingstock to a vibrant urban oasis.

|Before (from _Suburban Nation_) | After (from CMSS, via Bacon’s Rebellion)|
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Andres Duany, the New Urbanism evangelist, carries a carousel of slides to illustrate his speeches with real-world examples of atrocious urban design. For years, one of his favorites — for all I know, he uses it still — was an aerial shot of the intersection of Independence and Virginia Beach Boulevards in the Pembroke area of Virginia Beach.

This suburban abomination consisted of 20 or more lanes of traffic colliding at a single point. Flanking the thoroughfares were acres upon acres of mostly empty parking lot. And shoved off to the edges of the image — separated by vast distances that no sane person would negotiate on foot — were isolated stores and office buildings. Clearly, Duany would dead-pan with his inimitable sarcasm, Virginia Beach had designed the community for the care and feeding of automobiles. People evidently did not figure into the equation.

It may be time for Duany to find a new slide.

Pembroke, the least likely of locations, is undergoing a thorough-going transformation. Several blocks are blossoming with high-rise towers, parking decks, condominiums, stores, offices and restaurants. The streets are bustling with business executives, lunch goers, errand runners, even joggers….

In what had been an asphalt wasteland a few years ago, developers have brought online 300,000 square feet of office space, a comparable amount of retail, 342 apartment units and a 176-room hotel. Under construction today are another 42,000 square feet of retail, a 1,200-seat performing arts center and a 37-story hotel/residential tower — which will be the tallest building in Virginia. All told: about $400 million in investment….

In [architect Burrell] Saunders’ [principal of CMSS Architects] view, Virginia Beach’s main contributions were twofold: scrapping the zoning codes and other regulations that locked development into expensive and inefficient “sprawl” mode, and creating a Tax Increment Financing District for the development of structured parking and infrastructure improvements. Once the city let developers exercise their problem-solving ingenuity, growth took off.

A coalition of private business interests — led by Saunders, Gerald Divaris, Frederick Napolitano and Richard Olivieri — willed the urban center into existence in the face of initial skepticism and apathy on the part of city government. The city eventually came on board with funds of its own: contributing to parking, streetscapes, and other infrastructure improvements with the increased tax revenue flowing from the new development itself.

For those who think that re-working failed suburbs is a process that will take generations, Saunders’ assessment of Pembroke is profoundly optimistic. Yes, developers and city officials should approach their task with a 50-year planning horizon. “A city,” he says, “should be built to serve generations.” But Town Center has demonstrated that it’s possible to transform large pieces of the physical environment in just a few years…

Saunders “insists [that] Virginia doesn’t need to spend mega-billions of dollars on new road and transit projects to ameliorate traffic congestion,” since the urban form along those roads (“the road edge,” in engineer-ese) can take care of much of that. In a pioneering example of New Urbanism, “1000 Friends of Oregon”:http://www.friends.org/resources/lutraq.html launched a regional modeling process entitled “LUTRAQ: Making the Land Use, Transportation, Air Quality Connection,” but the message has yet to fully sink in: not only are all three so deeply intertwined that they’re effectively different sides of the same issue, but today we can now safely extrapolate from air pollution to water and climate, the emerging hot topics in environmental management.

bq. Transportation is not an issue that should be left only to the traffic engineers. Their solution is to add more lanes of roadway. A better approach is to change where people live, work and play. “We have enough roads,” Saunders says. “We have enough asphalt. It’s a question of how you organize the use of the asphalt.”

Given that Duany always uses that slide to show just how far overboard the highway engineers and zoning engineers (aka planners) have gone, it’s quite a revelation indeed.

Neighbors Project

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I picked up an anonymous flyer about theNeighbors Project recently, apparently an attempt to engage Chicago’s citizens in placemaking political action. Their mission sounds promising:

bq. Our mission is to activate and organize members of the urban generation in cities across the nation. We will strengthen and invigorate city neighborhoods one neighbor at a time throughout our lives. Our grassroots movement will make diverse cities with a healthy grassroots culture rooted in public streets and institutions the preferred place to live for Americans of every kind.

Yet it’s all quite nebulous right now, perhaps by design since it’s young. They’ve contacted my garden group and we’ll find out what they’re about soon.

Promising examples abound, like “City Repair”:http://www.cityrepair.org/wiki.php/projects in the Northwest, the “Toronto Public Space Committee”:http://www.publicspace.ca/elections/about as well as the various quasi-party public action committees (and affiliated candidate slates) that other cities have (particularly in Canada, with good examples like “COPE”:http://www.cope.bc.ca/issues-city.htm in Vancouver and “Projet Montréal”:https://westnorth.com/2005/11/28/urban-green-politics-arrives-in-montreal).