10th anniversary post: Places and non-places

Ikea, Schaumburg IL: Place of cloning, or just too much parking?

Ten years ago, New Year's Day 2014 began the first full year of the Holy Mountain blog. I published seven posts in the first month of that year, more than any January since, including a picture of the pile near Indian Creek Nature Center where I deposited our Christmas tree (which I did again today). Almost anything I saw was, it seemed, worthy of a post. I don't know how long I could have kept that up.

I posted responses to addresses by Governor Terry Branstad and President Barack Obama. I wasn't impressed with either one, but ten years later they fill me with nostalgia for a lost time. I was full of urbanism, and they weren't, but at least they weren't all about lashing out at enemies, and using poor children and immigrants to score political points. Trump, the bull in our national china shop, has broken so much it will take years to repair. I miss superficiality.

 

(The "poisoning our blood" speech, from C-SPAN (1:23). If I can't explain the continuing appeal of this galoot, I should probably retire.)

My first post of 2014 was informed by the concept of place, which is what had started me on this project a few months earlier, however much I had already given it over to urbanism. I looked at three phenomena that challenged our understanding of what made something a place:

• non-places, described by Marc Auge (Non-Places: An Introduction to Super-Modernity [Verso, 2nd ed, 2010]) as locales that are meant to be consumed or moved through rather than lived in. "So," I concluded, "we get interstate highways, airports, shopping malls, motels, subdivisions and office parks that are virtually indistinguishable..."
• places of cloning, described by Lineu Castello (Rethinking the Meaning of Place: Conceiving Place in Architecture-Urbanism [Ashgate, 2010]) as "buildings that look like they've been ordered from a catalog."
• virtual places, suggested by Matt Macfarland's post on robot surrogates for shut ins.

The common theme here is that a place is somehow authentic, and that our modern lifestyles are depriving us of experiencing authentic places, while providing substitutes that presumably fall short of such authenticity. Are you truly some place if it's a copy of some place else?

Looking from the street towards the river:
Great American Building plaza
(Google Earth screenshot)

Castello is an architect, not an academic, and quickly veered from definition to whether a "cloned" building could integrate into its surroundings in a way that enhanced human activity there. Following Castello, I compared the post-flood construction of the Great America Building, an office high-rise on Cedar Rapids's southeast side, and the downtown Doubletree Hotel that also contains the Alliant Energy Powerhouse arena. The Great America building might be unremarkable-looking, but it works great in its location and sits atop a great riverside plaza. The hotel squats across downtown, makes walking down 1st Avenue difficult, breaks up the street grid, and is rather pallid. There's more to design than originality.

Cloning puts me in mind of pre-reviewed plans, a design shortcut I encountered at last summer's Congress for the New Urbanism. Jennifer Krouse of Liberty House Plans described sets of house plans that could be approved en masse by municipalities, so developers could skip that stage and get straight to building. They promise to cut the extra costs of construction, contributing to the critical goal of housing affordability. Should we worry that houses will start looking too similar, if we can get people living in them?

Built to the street, but doors don't open: Commons on 1st
(Google Earth screenshot)

It's easy to knock places of cloning like Commons on 1st, constructed in Mound View in the years since my post on place, or non-places like the Fleet Farm plaza along the Highway 100 extension. Their problems are not a lack of authenticity; their problems are how they don't interact with their surroundings, and in the case of Fleet Farm, the utter lack of human scale.

Discussion of virtual places comes from thinking about potential downsides to our increasingly e-connected world. The shutdowns in response to the coronavirus pandemic proved to be an interesting experiment in the downsides and upsides of electronic society and remote work. The debate continues. But the Macfarland post, sent to me by my friend Niles Ross, related to the utility of virtual socializing for the frail elderly. The suburban development pattern is no place for the elderly (Durand-Wood 2024); at least once a week, I think when I'm walking that "I won't be able to do what I just did in ten years." Maybe the retirement megacampuses are the answer; I can probably afford to live at one, although I'd miss seeing people who weren't my age. 

 

Maybe we all will come to rely on little Nao, and I'll send mine to the coffeehouse in the morning and the bar at night. Maybe this is how we in the wealthy west respond to dysfunction: if our development pattern isn't working for your life, we've got a product for you! Easier to sell products than to build great places?