We build community from the ground up

Source: eskipaper.com (Creative Commons)

My spirits have been trending low of late. Maybe I'm not getting enough Vitamin B, or maybe winter's gone on too long. Maybe I'm kind of a pessimist. Or maybe it has something to do with last week's Democratic presidential debate, an unprecedented display of obstreperousness that has me thinking that President Trump's reelection is increasingly likely. Mismanagement of government, personal corruption, foully abusive rhetoric, and cruel treatment of the most vulnerable among us have cost the President nothing, and have if anything solidified his base. Meanwhile, the viable alternatives are eating each other up like the gingham dog and calico cat. "O Scotland, Scotland!"

Three years ago, as Trump began his Presidency, I dared to hope that his performance would result in broad and decisive repudiation. Although his presidency has been even more relentlessly bad than I could have foreseen, at this point broad repudiation seems far from likely. If he is defeated for reelection, it will be narrowly, with the results in a few states decisive. The next Democratic president, for whom I can tell you right now I will surely vote, will have run based on unaffordable promises and sticking it to the billionaires, and will find themselves at the helm of a broken government of a riven, ungovernable country. Good luck with that.

We are, in short, more broken and more fearful than I'd thought. Putting the pieces back together is going to take a long time, the next President's first term at the very least. And the first thing we need to do--not what some President needs to do, but what we need to do, so Presidents can eventually do productive President stuff--is to learn how to live together.

That starts locally. (For an argument that this has already started in towns around the United States, see Studer 2020.)

Source: wuestenigel.com (Creative Commons)

One set of interesting ideas is floating around Paris, France. Anne Hidalgo, running for reelection as the Mayor of the City of Paris, wants to make it a "15-minute city" (O'Sullivan 2020). This means something different in a city with 21000 residents per square mile that has closed many streets to through auto traffic, than it would in a sprawling burg like Cedar Rapids, where most adults can get anywhere in 15 minutes by getting in their cars. The campaign's image...

Paris En Commun campaign image

...shows work, shopping, dining, recreation, culture and health care within walking distance of every residence ("chez moi"). This would involve sacrificing road space to pedestrians and cyclists, designing public spaces for multiple use throughout the day, and promoting small shops, clinics, and performance spaces. It would involve somehow comfortably accommodating the needs of hordes of tourists as well as those residents who couldn't afford rising rents driven by the new amenities. City Lab notes that Mayor Hidalgo's plan as yet has neither timetable nor budget.

Even so, similar approaches have been proposed in other cities, including Barcelona, London, Melbourne, and Portland. More important for our blogging purposes are the principles are at work here: these advocates are striving to build inclusive communities.

Carlos Moreno, who teaches at the Sorbonne as well as serving as an adviser to Hidalgo's campaign, articulates six "things that make an urbanite happy,” including “Dwelling in dignity, working in proper conditions, [being able to gain] provisions, well-being, education and leisure. To improve quality of life, you need to reduce the access radius for these functions” (Belaich 2020, translated and quoted at O'Sullivan 2020). I will argue that these six are also opportunities that ought to be available to everyone--to be clear, not to make the state the employer, educator or entertainer of last resort, but to design the city such that all of these are attainable to everyone.

So, how to translate this to a contemporary American city, a typical one where, as O'Sullivan of City Lab reminds us, "Car-centric suburban-style zoning [has led] to an era of giant consolidated schools, big-box retail strips, and massive industrial and office parks, all isolated from each other and serviced by networks of roads and parking infrastructure (O'Sullivan 2020)?" That's my town, all right, and probably yours, too. Most people here are used to it, and content enough with it that they fear changes more than either such traffic as there is or the externalities it produces (pollution, isolation, lack of exercise, &c.).

Collins Road Square on Black Friday

We need the city government, not to make our choices for us, but to make choices possible. That means recognizing that not everyone has a car; while usually around here that is for economic reasons, going car free might be a commendable environmental or lifestyle choice, were it possible. Whether or not you actually have a car in Cedar Rapids, they are a necessity. They should at least be a choice.

Our transit system could and should continue to evolve, and ditto our bike infrastructure. But it's darned near impossible to design bus or bike routes for a sprawled city, where even bus riders live far apart from each other. So we need to point towards at least some parts of the city becoming denser, allowing granny flats and even small apartment buildings. Strong Towns argues that the next level of development in any neighborhood ought to be automatically legal (Marohn 2016); let it be so. While affordable housing is a different issue here than in a boomtown like Seattle or San Francisco, my friend Eric tells me it's impossible to build a $100,000 house. So let's have ordinances that encourage preservation and sale of existing housing stock, and that require landowners to keep older housing stock in reasonable shape so it continues to be livable. Pass a land value tax: It should not be possible to hold onto valuable property, letting it lie fallow or degrade, without paying for the privilege (Siskoff 2020).

Protesting demolition of the Hach Building in New Bohemia, 2014.
This property, in primo location by the Bridge of Lions, is currently fallow with no prospect of development.

Same goes for commercial buildings. We do have a yen for the shiny and new, and back it up with tax increment financing. But shiny new rents are hard to afford for local businesses, so the shiny new building down the street from me houses a Jimmy John's franchise, a Scooter's Coffee franchise, a Clean Laundry franchise, and an H & R Block tax franchise. Given that local businesses do better at job creation and at keeping money in the community, we should do better by them (Studer 2019).

We need to support public institutions, in particular public schools, but also libraries, parks, and so forth. When they suffer, middle-class people can always find alternatives. This is less true for people of lower incomes. A city with good neighborhood schools is a strong city. A city where the well-off have created housing and educational enclaves for themselves, and the heck with everyone else, is not a strong city.

Finally, we need to make life better--safer and more comfortable--for pedestrians and cyclists. Narrow the streets to slow the cars, build sidewalks where they haven't been built already, and maintain them where they are. The city could look into helping people concerned about upkeep of sidewalks, if it weren't already gasping to keep up with maintaining our ever-expanding street network. Sidewalks, bike lanes, and trails are not only important for getting around, they're important places for the public to meet each other. A walkable city provides thousands of incidental contacts every day, which is the basis for trust across lines of difference.

Neighborhood connections are not popular with everyone.

I wish this resonated with people. But we are a country of individualists, for whom community is often defined narrowly or even viewed with suspicion. We spend a lot of money and effort keeping the wrong people away, because they're inconvenient--they might park where we're used to parking, they might get in our way when we're in a hurry, their stuff might fill a view we've become accustomed to--or because we've been taught to fear them. Ownership and security are powerful motivators.

President Trump knows this. Despite multiple profound flaws, he's built a resilient presidency by appealing to people's fears, often in the most grotesque but apparently crowd-pleasing ways--the atrocious handling of refugees stands out.  Here in Cedar Rapids, any attempt to improve access to housing or non-car transportation runs up against a wall of fear and anger.  Just ask the developers of affordable housing on Edgewood Road, or live work units off Johnson Avenue. The residents of Chandler Street SW and Grande Avenue SE successfully fended off the spectre of sidewalks. Now Cottage Grove Place is weighing in against a proposed trail development between Washington High School and the Cemar Trail.

The 21st century demands an alternative to our dominant paradigms of development: market forces looking for short-term profits, political leaders listening to whatever song a big developer sings, and individuals protecting their patch of ground from children walking to school. We need something no law can provide: a cultural change that favors community, recognizing individual autonomy not as an absolute value but as the fantasy it is.

We need to conduct ourselves as if other people mattered.

I still believe in The City

At the Paix pour Paris vigil, Cedar Rapids

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

--DOROTHY DAY

I've just finished Vivian Gornick's short, elegant The Odd Woman and the City (cited below). A cross between memoir and segmented essay, it describes her life in and relationship to New York City--Bronx in her youth, Manhattan as an adult. Her most soaring passages celebrate life in the city:

It's an evening in June and I am taking a turn through Washington Square. As I stroll, I see in the air before me, like an image behind a scrim, the square as it looked when I was young, standing right behind the square that I'm actually looking at.... With the street at my back and everything I know etched on my face, I look through the scrim directly into those old memories and I see that they no longer have authority over me. I see the square as it is--black, brown, young; swarming with drifters and junkies and lousy guitar players--and I feel myself as I am, the city as it is. I have lived out my conflicts not my fantasies, and so has New York. We are at one. (pp. 169-170)

Each day when I leave the house, I tell myself I'm going to walk up the East Side of town because the East Side is calmer, cleaner, more spacious. Yet I seem always to find myself on the crowded, filthy, volatile West Side. On the West Side life feels positively thematic. All that intelligence trapped inside all those smarts. It reminds me of why I walk. Why everyone walks. (pp. 94-95)

It's her life, of course, and it's her city, but at a general level it's the Life in the City that is the fondest promise of the urbanists. Not that she is by any means Pollyannish or sanguine about it--there appear frequently in her stories the jostling of crowds, the noise of construction equipment and amplified music, the danger of crime, and the frequent encounters with fragile people that can make city life less than pleasant. But the energy and promise of the city and its people--all of its people--more than make up for the annoyances. She identifies across three centuries with the British writer Samuel Johnson:

For Johnson the city was always the means of coming up from down under, the place that received his profound discomfort, his monumental unease. The street pulled him out of morose isolation, reunited him with humanity, revived in him his native generosity, gave him back the warmth of his own intellect. On the street Johnson made his enduring observations; here he found his wisdom. Late at night, when he went prowling for tavern conversation, he experienced the relief of seeing his own need mirrored in the company he found: those who drank and talked of Man and God till the light broke because none of them wanted to go home either. (p. 10)

It's a good thing, too, that cities have attractive qualities, because for innumerable environmental and financial reasons urban areas are going to need to contract and get denser in the coming century. We're going to have to get closer to each other. Urbanism can help with that, by promoting the design features that undo a lot of the damage we've done in the post-WW2 boom.

But design will get you only so far. There has to be a readiness of a large part of the American people to live with a large and diverse population close by, and to accept that the threat of crime that comes with concentrated population is not worse than the threats that come with dispersed population. We simply cannot build enough roads and infrastructure to get everyone as far away from everyone else as they might wish to be. The only viable path is to learn to live together.

I thought about this after a spate of gun violence in our town last summer. Then, suddenly, the past few days have seen a series of terror attacks around the world: in Beirut, Paris, Baghdad and just now Lagos. All are attributed to ISIS, the rogue band of Islamists that seems intent on provoking a worldwide religious war. The West has responded with a mix of fear, anger and courage. At our best we are the Parisians of the 11th arrondissement, sitting proudly and defiantly at outdoor cafes (Alderman). At our worst we are the Republican governors and presidential candidates--including Iowa governor Terry Branstad, after an early cautious response--who have opted to stoke the public fear by declaring their states off limits to refugees from the Syrian implosion (Healy and Bosman; compare to Inskeep). Or make overtly anti-Muslim statements (LoBianco). It must be hellishly awkward to be or look Arabic in France right now (Nossiter and Alderman).

Fear and anger are direct threats to our ability to live together. They are certainly understandable responses, natural under the circumstances. But they cannot be our only responses. Putting up walls and bellicose threats can't get us to the good life, or even a particularly secure life. The truly good life can only come collectively, which requires constructive solutions to the problems of our society--and even then, security can never be complete in this world. To try and live otherwise wastes money and corrupts our souls, and we miss out on all the fun different people can be. We can only live together, together.

SOURCES
Liz Alderman, "French Crowd Cafes to Defy Terror With a Sip of Wine," New York Times, 18 November 2015, A12
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)
Patrick Healy and Julie Bosman, "G.O.P. Governors Vow to Close Doors To Syrian Refugees," New York Times, 17 November 2015, A1, A10
Steve Inskeep, "Washington State Governor Says He Welcomes Syrian Refugees," The Two-Way: Breaking News from NPR, 18 November 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/18/456483078/washington-state-governor-says-he-welcomes-syrian-refugees
Tom LoBianco, "Kasich: Create Agency to Promote Judeo-Christian Values," CNN, 17 November 2015, http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/17/politics/john-kasich-judeo-christian-agency/index.html
Adam Nossiter and Liz Alderman, "Distrust, Even Fear, As Secular France Dims on Muslims," New York Times, 17 November 2015, A1, A8

Urban images in art: Gustave Caillebotte

from nga.org

This image of pedestrians on a Paris street is taken from one of the most beloved works of art ever, "Paris Street, Rainy Day" by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). As testimony to its place in the pantheon, quite the crowd turned out to see it on the final weekend of an exhibition of Caillebotte's work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., "Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye."

Entrance to the Caillebotte show, Saturday 10/3/15

It's not hard to imagine why Caillebotte's best-known work has such appeal: Even in the rain, Paris is Paris, and very few of us are currently in positions where we wouldn't rather be strolling in Paris. [Point of irrelevant information: I used to have an umbrella with this scene on it.] There are people, ordinary people like you and me, they look good, they're active, and the scene is very accessible. Like another mega-famous Impressionist work, George Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte," you feel like you could very comfortably pop into the scene yourself.

Yet Caillebotte's own attitude to the scene is marked by ambivalence, which becomes clear upon viewing five other Paris street scenes he painted during the same time period, between 1876 and 1880. He depicts a new Paris, produced in large part by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussman, a local official during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. Haussman's public works program assaulted the medieval city with brio, smashing old structures and widening streets. He was Robert Moses a century before Moses would remake New York City, except that the technology of Haussman's day prevented him from building expressways. Whatever the value of cleaning up the "dirty, crowded and unhealthy" old city (Rice, quoted in "Haussman," cited below), it also removed places of meeting... which may have been Napoleon III's idea to begin with.

Caillebotte's Paris paintings show people who are disconnected from each other, walking wide streets by buildings large and unfriendly enough to draw the ire of a 19th century James Howard Kunstler. (Come to think of it, Kunstler's favored word for this kind of design, "despotic," is precisely what Napoleon III was.) The city is not human-scaled, and the people are alienated.

"The Rue Halevy Seen from a Balcony," from wikigallery.org

The painter's vantage point, an upper-story window, means he (and by extension us) aren't connected to the people in the painting either. In none of the six paintings is anyone making eye contact with anyone else. Even the couple in "Paris Street, Rainy Day" isn't, upon a closer look, particularly connecting with each other. In "The Pont de l'Europe" I thought I saw someone looking at a dog, but despite Gracen Johnson's eloquent tribute to dogs' contributions to urbanism, I think he's actually looking between the dog and its owner.

from wikiart.org

A few days later, by something of a coincidence, I attended an exhibit of watercolors at the Waterloo Center for the Arts by local retired architect Michael Broshar. Broshar's cityscapes are cozy and human-scaled.

"Venice 1"

"Chicago Street"

Broshar paints places he enjoys, and it's easy to see why. Clearly he's making a different point than Caillebotte was.

Caillebotte's ambivalence is underscored by his suburban and rural landscapes included in the exhibition. (See, for example, "The Bridge over the Seine at Argenteuil," painted in 1885.) There is still no socializing, but the colors are brighter and the skies clearer. Thanks to the commentary accompanying the exhibit, I can also tell you his brushstrokes were bolder.

The Paris we know and love today evolved out of Haussman's overhaul. Somehow over time urbanism and complexity reasserted itself. Maybe in an America beset by suburban sprawl our frame of reference is different, too.

SEE ALSO: "Physical Design Issues Illustrated" (on Hale Woodruff), 15 April 2013

SOURCES:
Holland Carter, "Painting Paris in a New, Natural Light," New York Times, 10 July 2015, C17 & 19
"Haussman and New Paris," https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/mapping-paris/Haussmann.html
Mary Morton and George Shackleford, Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye (Chicago, 2015)

Muddy but sociable: "The Halt at the Inn" by Isack van Ostade, c. 1645
National Gallery of Art