Summer Reading from Island Press

 

(6/8/2021) When Island Press has a sale, I'm interested, especially if they're $5 each, and even if they're e-books. Founded in 1984 as a non-profit publisher focusing on environmental issues, Island has published some fine works on urbanism, including Cities for People by Jan Gehl (2010) and The Regional City by Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton (2001). I think if I had unlimited time, space, and funds, I might buy their whole catalogue!

Reader, I did not buy their whole catalogue, but I picked a few which speak particularly well to our common lives in these times.

Shane Phillips, The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach (and Keeping it There) (Island, 2020).

Phillips addresses the shortage of affordable housing in many of America's cities by taking on what we might call Cortright's Paradox: increasing access to shelter in places with access to opportunities threatens the value of existing housing in those places. (For many households, the home they own is their major investment for retirement.)

Such a complicated problem has not yielded a slam-dunk solution, and Phillips does not pretend that it will. His approach is to seek joint gains for current homeowners, future homeowners, current and future renters, landlords, developers, and local governments. Like Matthew Desmond in Evicted [Crown, 2016], he describes a world not of clear saints and sinners, but all kinds of people mostly trying to do their best in uncertainty. A helpful introduction for non-practitioners is provided in the appendix, "Development and Real Estate Economics 101."

Phillips identifies three broad, complimentary interests: supply of places to live, stability of living situations, and subsidy by government to compensate for market failures. Under these goals he offers 40 specific policy proposals, which is a lot. They aren't a single indivisible package, though he urges governments not to adopt them piecemeal, or only to adopt the ones with particular ideological appeal. Whatever policies are pursued should be done with a joint gains strategy. For example, if housing is going to be a secure investment, it must increase in value, which makes it less and less affordable (pp. 63-64). Allowing the supply to rise to meet demand may reduce the valuation of existing homes, but it will also allow property taxes to remain manageable, and while the owner's descendants may not benefit as much from inheriting it, they will likely benefit more from being able to afford to buy their own homes when the time comes.

Angie Schmitt, Right of Way: Race, Class and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (Island, 2020).

This was a difficult book to read, not because of the writing, which is excellent, but because of the subject matter. I can't imagine the strength of character it took to write it. Schmitt analyzes the available data and secondary sources on the thousands of pedestrian deaths each year, and comes to the inescapable conclusion that America has been willing to put up with carnage on the streets for the sake of unobstructed driving ("throughput," ch. 6) and auto industry profits (ch. 5).

Other research (chs 1-2) shows that pedestrian deaths are not random, but occur disproportionately in the new cities of the South and Southwest, on stroads where auto speeds are fast and pedestrian infrastructure is poor, and in lower-income and nonwhite neighborhoods. Pedestrian deaths are disproportionately caused by sport utility vehicles which are getting taller and heavier and consequently deadlier. (As I was reading this GMC introduced its new 9000 lb Hummer EV.) Older people and children are the most common victims. The picture this book paints of American materialism and indifference to others is bleak indeed.

She concludes on a hopeful note, that thanks to activism there has been increased awareness of the systemic nature of the problem, and that has led to design improvements in some places: better sidewalks, better street lighting, curb ramps, bus stops in safe places, longer traffic signals, more crosswalks with features to get the attention of drivers (p. 154). But even in New York City, the least car-dependent city in America, it required grieving parents to form Families for Safe Streets to get the government's attention. Making this right is going to be a long process.

Patrick M. Condon, Five Rules for Tomorrow's Cities: Design in an Age of Urban Migration, Demographic Change, and a Disappearing Middle Class (Island, 2019).

Condon combines positivity (we can do this!) with urgency (we must do this!), in view of climate change and persistent economic and demographic trends. His five rules are:

• following Jane Jacobs, see the city not as a set of isolated problems (e.g. solve parking shortage by building more parking lots) but as an integrated and complex system;
• following Christopher Alexander ("A City is Not a Tree," Architectural Forum, 1965), see the city as a "semi-lattice" series of patterns that fail when all are run through the city center;
• make infrastructure lighter, greener, and smarter, because the principal reason we have such a maintenance backlog is that we've been profligate in building the stuff in the first place;
• use affordable housing design that accounts for the need for financing, social resilience, change over time, and accommodating an aging population; and
• adapt to new economic realities "where stagnant salaries are the norm, secure employment increasingly rare, large student loan obligations common, and elevated housing costs nearly universal" (p. 135).

Not much in here will shock urbanists, but it's nice to have examples of successful adaptations, from the olden days (the traditional grid pattern, 1920s Vienna's scheme for building quality affordable housing through tax policy) as well as recent innovations (removing a highway and uncapping a river in Seoul, hiving or allowing subdivision of housing parcels in Vancouver, transforming big box stores into commercial bazaars or other arrangements appropriate to immigrant cultures). The important underlying theme seems to be that problems can be solved if we accept reality and want to solve them.

Steven Higashide, Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit (Island, 2019).

Higashide, who grew up with the CTA and now works for New York-based TransitCenter, is an unabashed supporter of buses, not only as an alternative to one-passenger cars but also as the disrespected cousin of commuter trains. This is a good, up-to-date survey of research on bus transit. He argues that between those who take the bus out of necessity and those who will never leave their cars for any reason there is a sizeable group that would take the bus if it were only serviceable. Improving bus service to lure them on would, incidentally, also improve service for those who use it out of necessity.

In a decade in which people moved "back to the city," overall bus ridership in America actually dropped 17 percent. Bus riders in the United States average half the national median income, while bus riders in Germany (and in cities like Seattle with strong systems) average the same income as everybody else. Moreover, in cities like Los Angeles with weak systems, even the poorest predominantly use other forms of transportation (p. 28). On the other hand, "Most transit systems have a large pool of customers who have experienced transit but have not committed to frequent use" (p. 30), and in places like Houston and San Francisco where leaders have actively sought to improve bus service, ridership has risen (p. 14)

To attract riders, bus systems need to be designed to be:

• frequent, so that a bus will come within 10 minutes (ch. 2); 
• fast and reliable, freed from auto traffic and obligated to make fewer stops, so that you can get to your destination in a reasonable and predictable amount of time (ch. 3); 
• walkable/dignified, so you can wait in a shelter, and can get safely from your stop to your destination (ch. 4);
• fair/welcoming payment systems, with special attention to marginalized communities (ch. 5).

The book concludes with advice to activists on how to make things happen.

The D6 was our "magic bus" when we lived in DC

Corrupting the youth 2021

 

The Coe Writing Center is your one-stop shop for help with papers
(Source: coe.edu; used without permission)

This fall I will be teaching in Coe's first-year experience program, which provides an introduction to the liberal arts mindset with interdisciplinary courses and a whirlwind of activities. My go-to course in the program is A Sense of Place; it is pursuing this subject matter over the years that led me to urbanism, and that has led me to you. So, yay FYE, even if I do suspect it is trying to kill me with complication.

This year, we will be focusing on third places, mostly by reading the classic The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg (Da Capo, [1989] 1999). Along the way, we will do three writing assignments, which I summarize here in the hopes of ginning up some feedback from you, faithful reader.

Paper 1: Reflective Essay

In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg describes a number of qualities of third places, as well as various benefits they provide individuals and communities. You might be thinking that no place could possible combine all of these qualities, and you'd be right. Real-world places at best approach the qualities of ideal-types.

Write an essay about a place you know well that has some of the qualities of a third place as described by Oldenburg. How well do its qualities match the characteristics Oldenburg attributes to third places? In what ways does it differ?

1271 1st Avenue SE, July 2020

Paper 2: Creative-Argumentative Essay

Now that you're familiar with the arguments for third places, turn your mind to a property near campus that served as a third place for many Coe faculty and students from 2000 until it closed in March 2020. What should go into the former Brewed Awakenings, and why? 

Use your imagination to consider how this building might be used for a successful business that would be a gathering place for Coe students. Then, make an argument for your idea.

Paper 3: Documented-Argumentative Essay

In the last several years, there have been a large number of projects that attempt to (re)build communities capable of supporting the sorts of third places we've been plugging in this course. This assignment asks you to identify one project that could be adapted to a town you know well.

Browse some of the following sites, and find an example of a project that would benefit your town. (I include links to Project for Public Spaces, Better Block, Human Transit, Reinventing Parking, The Urbanist, The Scenic Route, and Retrofitting Suburbia.)

With the help of the reference librarians, look for additional resources on that project. Then, write a 4-6 page paper, explaining the project, and then how a similar project would help your town.

Better Block project in Cedar Rapids, spring 2018
(photo by Ben Kaplan)

These three writing assignments should enable to students to engage with Oldenburg's concept of the third place as well as third place-friendly design projects, and to imagine their application to familiar territory.

Fellow lovers of cities and/or coffee, what do you like about these assignments? More importantly, what do you see as missing that would help newcomers to these ideas?

SEE ALSO: 

"My Letter to the First-Years," 12 July 2016

"Out of the Mouths of Babes," 23 April 2019

CNU diary 2021

 

Monday, May 17 (Day -2)

The Congress for the New Urbanism conference officially gets underway Wednesday, but I'm all for taking advantage of the two days of workshops and special sessions ahead of the conference proper. Instead of Oklahoma City as originally planned, for the second year in a row we're online. I'm abuzz with curiosity as to how these conferences work in person!

Ashleigh Walton (goarchitect.com)

The first CNU29 session I attended was "Principles of New Urbanism" at 2:30 p.m. CT, featuring architect-designer Ashleigh Walton with former CNU president Victor Dover. She defined new urbanism as "radical (a reversal of typical development patterns), simple (a look back to the most loved places), practical (real/efficient/scalable/long-term), and for everyone (providing choices at every scale of development, from the metro region down to the single lot)." The goal is to "affect both policy and design" in order to build "places people love," but also places that provide more economic value to cities. She also touched on specific topics like the transect, form-based codes, and missing-middle housing. 

• One question was how do urbanists reconcile the increased value they create with the need for affordable housing? Walton said affordability came with choices and supply, which are also concerns of urbanism. To another questioner, she said "the best urbanism tends to not be new" infrastructure, but she cited Charleston SC, Greenville SC, Huntsville AL, and Sewickley Heights PA as towns that are currently pursuing different interesting projects. 
• The biggest hurdles to spreading the word are the perception of exclusivity; Dover added the fear of any change because previous changes have been negative. The session served not only an introduction for new attendees, but a rededication for long-time members, like members of a church hearing a creed or familiar scripture.

I also attended "Land Use Planning and Structural Racism: Unpacking the Link," in which Jess Zimbabwe of Environmental Works presented an ingenious "alphabet book" of planning-design indignities that have been inflicted on people of color (B for blockbusting, C for covenants, e.g.).

Marguerite Yourcenar

Before all that, however, I visited a Coe colleague's non-CNU webinar on a short story by Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987). "A Blue Tale," written in the 1920s but not available in the United States until 1995, describes the voyage of some European merchants to a mysterious island rich in blue gems, which they take, but these gains eventually lead them to bad ends. My colleague, Joyce Janca-Aji, saw the story as "an introduction to non-dualistic thinking," seeking an alternative to commonplace western dualities like mine/yours, human/nature, economic/spiritual that have contributed to the messes in which we now find ourselves. Like Yourcenar's ecofeminism, urbanists seek to recover premodern practices and language that can allow us to make the changes we need to make. "By telling our stories," she concluded, "We may have better outcomes."

Janca-Aji described Yourcenar as "wildly hopeful." I could use some of that wild hope as I mourn my way through books like Jane Mayer's Dark Money (Doubleday, 2016) and Angie Schmitt's Right of Way (Island, 2020)... excellently researched and written books that describe two of our worst western messes. May I find some wild hope this week!

Tuesday, May 18 (Day -1)

OK, here's a thing about online versus on-site conferences: On site--say, in Oklahoma City--you are fully present, even immersed in the place where you are. This morning, a situation came up at work with a difficult colleague, and I found myself chewing on that all day even during the most stimulating of presentations. Were I in "OKC," I might not even have been aware of the problem!

This year's conference is exploring how urbanism can be used to address pressing social problems, like climate change, equity, and the aftermath of the pandemic. At 10:30 CT Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, co-author of the ur-text Suburban Nation [North Point, 2000], talked about how urbanism might contribute to climate change adaptation. She distinguished "adaptation" from "mitigation," as dealing with the effects of climate change (resilience) as opposed to trying to prevent it (sustainability). For that reason, I've always been morally ambivalent about adaptation, but she showed how urbanism can contribute to its effectiveness. Whether dealing with initial "defense" measures like protecting bridges and buildings,  "accommodation" like the Cedar Rapids flood walls (below), or discussing and executing "retreat" scenarios, urbanism can provide the vision as well as specific examples and rules for social organization. 

Construction of Cedar Rapids flood wall at 16th Av, summer 2020

What about equity? asked moderator and CNU chair Lynn Richards. Plater-Zyberk seemed unready for this, but suggested making it easier for people to move around by removing regulations that make it difficult, and designing better new places in which "everyone is committed to everyone having a good place to live."

What about the towns on the receiving end? The next session dealt with "welcoming cities," potentially places like Cleveland and Buffalo that have lost population for decades but might be suddenly attractive to climate refugees. Cleveland has the space, but even there social integration and preventing displacement would be tough.

My last pre-conference session was Steve Mouzon's talk on the characteristics of lovable buildings--not spectacles loved by architects, but "humane building" that would be attractive to people in the neighborhood. It was 90 minutes of information packed into a little more than 30; the two hosts said they'd seen it before, and I will have to see it again, or replay it at half-speed, before anything sticks.

Unlovable?: Mouzon refers to this building style as "ransom note,"
a term he credits to John Anderson

Wednesday, May 19 (Day 1)

Deanna Van Buren (from designingjustice.org)

The role of design is "to ignite radical imagination," claimed Deanna Van Buren in the keynote address, "Designing for Justice," late this afternoon. She heads a design school in Oakland whose mission is to "un-build racism" by designing alternatives to incarceration. She began with a priceless audio recording of her grandmother talking about her grandmother, who had been enslaved. Un-building racism begins by recognizing our own internalized views which have been shaped by centuries of displacement and dispossession; then we ask what we value, and how we manifest those values. This has meant engaging with formerly incarcerated men and women, which informed the local site selection and the home-like environment of the New Westside Peacemaking Project in Syracuse, a "peacemaking center" for restorative justice. Then followed Restore Oakland, a more comprehensive campus, including a Pop-Up Village service center. She also has been working in Atlanta to retrofit a closed prison, and in Detroit to refashion the streetscape on Grand River Avenue.

Earlier in the day I attended three panels. 

• "Healthy Urban Environments: New Insights from Neuroscience, Psychology, and Mathematics" presented a number of neuroscience, environmental psychology and mathematical perspectives on our issues. All point to human needs both for protection, which we emphasized in the 2020-21 pandemic, and connections, which humans still need and which we still need to facilitate. Biometric research on human reactions to places underscores the need to return to human-scaled design. Panelist Ann Sussman noted people look for people, face-like facades, and something to anchor on like an interesting mural, "so we can 'see' why suburbs aren't walkable." 
• "Equitable Development" looked at some specific ways (affordable housing projects, community land trusts, accessory commercial units) developers have tried to be more inclusive; the panel began with a brilliant graphic "timeline of housing segregation" presented by Marianne Cusato.
• "Suburban Remix: Creating Walkable Density in the Suburbs" looked at a suburban retrofit project along Lyndale Avenue in Bloomington, Minnesota, moving from auto-centric design to one that attempts to ride several of the waves of change including desires for walkable centers, changes in retail, changes in how and where we work, and ongoing demographic and economic change.

A number of social opportunities beckoned in the evening, but after choir rehearsal I was doubting my social synapses. Tomorrow, for sure!

Thursday, May 20 (Day 2)

Veritas Cafe, Cedar Rapids

Before I returned to the conference this morning, I did some urbanism, meeting my friend John Herbert for coffee at the Veritas Cafe downtown. While we were chatting, two other mutual friends happened through and briefly joined us... very third placy!

John asked me how my experience of the conference is different with it being online. I've never been to an in-person CNU... yet! and it is weird just watching webinar after webinar, though the subject matter is compelling. What about the social side? My preference would be to hover on the edge of conversation groups in bars or wherever, but at online CNU the "pub crawl" consists of a succession of small breakout groups. I was fortunate in my second and third groups to be with the jolly and loquacious Andres Duany, who made a substantive if light-hearted case for zoning reform to legalize family compounds. In the first group, tech magician Matthew Lambert called on me so I gave a bit of my background; in the second I participated naturally in the conversation; and in the third I hung back and enjoyed the repartee. I retired after round three. Also, among the first group was Edward Erfurt, who wrote an article I've taught, but I couldn't remember the subject.

Better or worse than crawling at an actual pub? I probably encountered more people, and they had names attached on Zoom, but probably less substantial conversation and no beer unless I fetched it myself from the fridge. Meanwhile, Internet problems meant people were breaking up more and more as the evening went along, which in real life would only happen if I drank to sodden excess. 

The four panels I attended, with varying levels of attention, were:

• (11:45) "Urban Design Update I": salad bar of initiatives, with some websites that might be useful for my first-year seminar
• (1:15) "Zoning for Equitable Development": how form-based zoning and other anti-Euclidean reforms (simplification, compatibility, allowing or requiring renewable energy, local food, landscaping, complete streets, no parking minima, composting and water quality initiatives, ADUs, reduced setbacks, multifamily housing) help to overcome disadvantages created by historic racism. But the in the Q & A someone brought up resistance by black homeowners to zoning reform because it facilitates white/out-of-town landlords buying up properties to subdivide and rent.
• (2:45) "Urban Design in the Universities": 13 academic urbanists talked about what they wish their programs would add or augment, tending towards less aggressive architecture and more attention to context/place
• (4:30) "Pandemic Toolkits at Work": how design is responding or could respond to innovations and changed habits in the last year, without over-correcting for things that have had to pause.

Friday, May 21 (Day 3)

I was glad to start my conference day with some baked goods and coffee at Sykora Bakery in Czech Village. Sykora's is a Cedar Rapids landmark, visited in 1995 by Bill Clinton and Vaclav Havel (along with President Meciar of Slovakia) when they were here to dedicate the new building of the National Czech and Slovak Museum. The building was built for a bar in 1900, and has been a bakery since 1903. While I was there, a mom and son came in after a medical appointment. I took the chance to look at some of the virtual tours on the conference app, starting with Logan Square and Washington Park in the city of my birth, Chicago, Illinois. Logan Square has recently built some affordable housing after undergoing substantial gentrification; Washington Park suffers from under-investment, at least along Garfield Boulevard. Both neighborhoods are rich in art reflecting local heritage, and both offer walkability with at least one dangerous cross of a six-lane street. Then I watched an appealing video about the  new urbanist town of Las Catalinas, Costa Rica, from across the street from Sykora in the Kosek Bandstand.

It's interesting to ponder walkability while in Czech Village, which has repurposed older buildings and human scale, but which lost a swath of housing in the 2008 flood. In fact, much of the core of Cedar Rapids has the pre-World War II bones of a walkable area, but it's definitely been hollowed out over the decades. (A 1930s picture of Bethel AME Church south of downtown shows it surrounded by residences; today it is surrounded by empty lots). There has been a lot of building since 2008; I think I could be happy living in one of the apartments over the businesses that have been rehabbed by an energetic woman named Mary Kay McGrath. For the most part, new construction has been heavy on the condos in New Bohemia and Kingston Village. The surrounding residential neighborhoods, like Wellington Heights and Mound View, have older housing, but not much in the way of basic services.

Today's panels:

• 11:45 "The Post-Pandemic City": Andres Duany ran through a variety of innovations that address newer social needs, including portable housing for the unhoused, an elevated city in flood-prone regions, and field urbanism modeled on warehouse districts which seem to attract young people more than traditional urbanism like Czech Village or Galena. Also compounds again. There were some interesting comments in the "chat," and I wish there had been time for discussion.
• 1:00 "STEP Buildings, the Embodiment of Incremental Development": Gracen Johnson unveiled an ingenious game deck of 49 cards, depicting low-cost housing adaptations, in categories like HOUSE HACKS, MAIN STREET MIXED, NEIGHBORHOOD NODE, and COMBO, so developers and advocates could be "strategic within the rules." Eric Kronborg followed with actual plans with examples of those types of incremental development.
• 2:30 "Urban Design Update II": More urbanism salad. I like salad. Possibly the most controversial presentation was that of planner Bob Gibbs, who said that planned urbanist shopping areas were actually failing at a higher rate than indoor shopping malls. That seems counter-intuitive, but I was at one of those urbanist shopping areas in Virginia in 2018, and it was soulless, like somebody's idea of what a downtown should look like, but uniform in age and the retail was more mall than downtown. 

And so, CNU29 is in the books. It was an interesting few days. CNU30 will be in person, in Oklahoma City, which will be a lot better, except I find it will be in March. So I won't be able to be there, due to prior commitments. One of these years, for sure. I need to raise my networking game, though. This week I was "neither here nor there," literally.

SEE ALSO: "CNU Diary," 8-13 June 2020

A Brandon Whyte retrospective

MPO ride 2015: Why is the paint green?

Brandon Whyte, whose presence as multimodal transportation planner for the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization has been large and constant throughout the lifetime of this blog, will be leaving Cedar Rapids for Mountain View, California, for a new job closer to family. "This job gave me purpose," Brandon said of his time in Cedar Rapids. "Serving you all, trying to improve walking and biking in the metro, is literally what I wanted to do with my life since college--since I learned that this profession was even a possibility." He offers hope for the day when the trail system will "become world-class."

By way of a parting salute, Holy Mountain offers this tour through Brandon Whyte's greatest hits--some of them, anyway--where we have crossed paths in the last eight years.

Bike to Work Week 2014: Early look at New Bohemia development

Bike to Work Week 2015: 1st Ave pit stop

MPO ride 2015: announcing Hoover Trail south of Ely

August 2015: protected bike lane demo,
led to praise for Brandon on strongtowns.org

MPO ride 2016: meet the mountain bike trail at Beverly Park

Bike to Work Week 2016: Mayor Corbett prepares to ride to Kickstand

Bike to Work Week 2017: Collins pit stop

MPO ride 2017: trail crossing at Boyson Road

October 2018: support for Tower Terrace Road ped-bike trail

August 2018: last leg of Cedar Valley Trail opened! 

May 2019: bike rental rollout

An expanding trails system is Brandon's legacy

And who could forget those bus route surveys!

Anyone who enjoys thinking about these issues as much as I do is a friend for sure! And what joy to see the buses rolling again after the shutdown!

So long, my friend. Thank you for all your good work, and good health to you and your family. Say hi to Charles Babbage if you see him!

Computer History Museum, Mountain View CA, July 2014

Is America a Racist Country? is a Dumb Question

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC)

Senator Tim Scott's response to President Joe Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress last week was most remarkable for its discussion of race. Senator Scott combined personal experience ("I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason") with defenses of Republican efforts to change state voting laws ("Republicans support making it easier to vote and harder to cheat" as if none of us was paying attention on January 6). Along the way, he made the statement that "America is not a racist country." The context:

Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them, and if they look a certain way, they're an oppressor. From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we've worked so hard to heal. You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country. It's backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.

There was a good deal of politics in the Senator's speech, and some reference to ongoing policy debates, but the statement that got the most attention was the one above. Vice President Kamala Harris faced the question the next day on the network TV show "Good Morning America." Her response--Well, first of all, no, I don't think America is a racist country, but we also do have to speak the truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today--was calculated but hard to beat.

"America is/is not a racist country" is exactly the sort of simplistic formulation that hijacks the "debates" Scott doesn't want shut down. It presumes that there is some clear, binary distinction between all-in racism and all-out equality. We don't get a definition of "racism," or for that matter of "country," so whatever we're talking about is the pictures in our own heads. It's the rhetorical equivalent of blasting the national anthem in the middle of a conversation.

Here's the tricky part: If every single person in America refused with a pure heart ever to judge people by the color of their skin, we would have a serious race problem. Anyway. Still. Because the country we live in is the product of decisions made in its past: the exclusion of blacks from 1930s federal housing programs, the destruction of walkable black neighborhoods in the 1950s interstate highway program, the persistence of discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations into my lifetime. Of course, much of this is over. Of course, de jure discrimination has long been illegal. But those long-ago actions led to outcomes that reinforced centuries-old differences between the black and white experiences in America. Without redress or reparation, those disparate outcomes replicate themselves today, producing something that looks a lot like racism.

We should be talking about how we deal with that--and to their credit, a lot of people are--not arguing over phony definitional binaries.

SEE ALSO: 

Rashawn Ray, "Is the United States a Racist Country?" How We Rise (Brookings), 4 May 2021

Pete Saunders, "Racist Impact, If Not Intent, Is Built Into the American DNA," Corner Side Yard, 9 May 2021

The Chauvin Verdict: Looking Backward

 

(zahlenparty.de; used without permission)

Derek Chauvin, the fired police officer whose flagrant killing of George Floyd in that city last May galvanized a summer of protest including here in Cedar Rapids, was found guilty of Floyd's death by a jury this afternoon. The Twin Cities seemed braced for disturbances had the verdict been unfavorable; so far there have been no reports of violence attendant to either protests or celebrations. President Biden praised the verdict, while suggesting we have a long way to go for what he called "basic accountability" for our black citizens.

Twenty-five years from now, will this sad event be seen as an inflection point in American history, setting us at last towards healing; or will it have been largely forgotten, another in a long sad series of racial violence? 

The Case for Forgetting

(1) The unique circumstances of the murder, including Chauvin's grotesque behavior, his disavowal by the Minneapolis police department, and a video by a teenage bystander that exposed the lies in the initial police report--mean it's unlikely to set a precedent for future trials. Fatal gunshots are easy to explain away as resulting from the heat of the situations, whereas choking a man to death over more than nine minutes requires a degree of malice that is harder to justify. In the last several days, blacks in Minnesota, Columbus, and North Carolina have been killed in police shootings, and video was released on a March shooting of a Chicago teenager. The officers involved may not be prosecuted, and even if they are, the prosecution is unlikely to succeed (see Balko 2021, Stinson and Wentzlof 2019).

(2) Fear, as Martha Nussbaum (The Monarchy of Fear [Simon and Schuster, 2018], esp. ch. 2) says, is a powerful pre-cognitive emotion, easily exploited/triggered by those with political agendas. Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) is doing important work in leading congressional negotiations over a police reform bill, but it hasn't been that long since the consensus for reform after Floyd's murder broke down as then-President Trump sought to run for reelection as defender of the police (Millhiser 2020).

(3) The systemic racism that underlies all of these outcomes has deep roots, in long history, and won't yield easily to the gridlock and incrementalism the American political system typically produces. We are where we are because of slavery, the failure to support freedmen after emancipation, Jim Crow laws, violence like the Tulsa riots, redlining and exclusion from New Deal housing programs, and bulldozing black neighborhoods for intercity expressways. That's an awful lot to ask police, even reformed police, to fix.

Chicago neighborhoods before the Dan Ryan
(photo by author at the National Museum of American History)

The Case for Inflection

(1) Floyd's murder inspired a broad and diverse coalition of protestors, who may be able to sustain the political pressure they began last summer, and to translate their passion into institutional change. Many more people than before are aware of the daily dilemmas of our black neighbors, even in mundane activities like going for a walk (Alston 2020). Maybe this awareness will make it harder to gaslight us with looting and other false choices.

(2) The succession of horrific events, such as the three police shootings listed above, has enlightened more people that there's something systemic going on. This by now should be clear: it isn't just about  a few "bad apples" on the force, or a few bad actors in the neighborhood making bad choices. When it happens over and over and over again, it's a trend. This realization too may help to insulate people against fear-mongering.

(3) Police departments may yet come to realize they are more effective when they are working with, not against, their communities. Of the three types of power we used to talk about in political science--superior force, economic incentives, and psychological--it's psychological power, people's willingness to obey authority of their own volition, that can be projected farthest. But as John Locke pointed out centuries ago, people are only willing to obey the government to the extent that their rights are protected. When the police realize that operating from behind a blue wall only makes their job harder in the long run, and even start to advocate for social change, we'll be getting some place, a good place, a place none of us has yet been.

SEE ALSO

"Race Relations After the Pandemic," May 27, 2020

"Race Relations After the Pandemic (II)," September 2, 2020

"Race Matters, Damn It," April 16, 2013

Why I Pedecommute (and Pedal Commute)

 

Walking to work has its challenges

(4/6/2021) When I was waiting to cross 1st Avenue on my bike on the first Monday of Earth Month, I saw a colleague getting out of her car. She's younger than me, and lives closer to the college. But driving is clearly the default option in our town, as in most places in America. Cars are seductive--for their convenience, for their accessories, and I guess for a certain type their power. I chose differently long ago, and I'm glad I did.

I need to note that my commuting mode is not strictly car-free, and my core motivation is hardly ethical. I simply enjoy walking, or riding my bicycle, over driving. I may well, though I hope I don't, counterbalance the environmental benefits of my commute in some other sector of my life.

I walk or ride because it gives my head time to clear before and after work. A time spent moving at a human pace, being truly able to see things and people around me, without the onrush of stimuli in and out of my car, is good for my mental health. It gives me time to process whatever is going on that needs processing. (For citations of actual research on this, see Rose 2016: 333-334.)

Jeff Speck in Cedar Rapids, 2015

Jeff Speck says in Walkable City that in order to encourage more people to walk, walking needs to be safe, interesting, useful, and comfortable (2012: 7-11). Cedar Rapids has made significant progress in some areas of town, but most of the city falls far short of these ideals, so I understand why I don't encounter more people on my walks. Most people will walk if there are places they need to go within easy walking distance, if they feel safe from cars, if buildings and trees provide a sense of enclosure, and if there are plenty of signs of human activity. That to some extent describes downtown and some parts of the core neighborhoods. Less than 30 percent of Cedar Rapids children walk to school, and that number will surely decline as schools are closed and attendance areas get larger.

Walking is good exercise. You can, and should, seek out aerobic exercise at a pool or gym, but most people don't. Most people get what exercise they get incidental to their daily tasks, which means if those tasks aren't achievable by a reasonable walk, most people drive and get no exercise. Exercise is good for the body and for the soul, but the way we design our towns makes it difficult. As a result, arguably a bigger factor than diet, over 30 percent of American adults and over 20 percent of teenagers are obese (higher in the Midwest).

Walking is also beneficial to social relations. You notice more of your surroundings when you are moving slowly within them, as opposed to moving fast through them. That is particularly true of the people we live among. A lot of my fellow humans don't look or act like me, but walking among them helps me get used to that. Walk the neighborhood day after day, year after year, and you begin to recognize people--and their dogs--you wouldn't have time to see from a car. Eric O. Jacobsen (2012: 173-174) cites Jane Jacobs (1961: chs 2-4) on the interaction of people on city sidewalks: watching each other means watching out for each other, repeated casual contacts build public trust, children have a chance to learn about the complex world around them. He concludes:

Implicit behind Jacobs's confidence in the city and neighborhood to function coherently is some sense of structure and order that emerges when people live in proximity to one another. There may be a number of ways to account for this implicit structuring and ordering, but one coherent way to think about it is to envision a gracious and sovereign God who both created humanity in his image and is drawing the human creation toward a communal experience of wholeness and harmony. (2012: 179)

One man walking can't make street life, but enough people walking make possible not only street life, but safe routes to school, third places, and other locally-owned small businesses. Cars make possible acres and acres of parking lots.

A Coe hawk by the sidewalk

Walking you notice more birds, too, not to mention the ways that humans thoughtlessly impact the natural world. Transportation accounts for 28 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, and in suburban-style development about doubles emissions from household energy use. Air pollution from motor vehicles costs about $10 billion a year if you factor in respiratory illnesses caused by pollution. New development, typically large lot subdivisions, takes two million acres of undeveloped land each year (cf. Hester 2006: 201-204, Speck 2012: 51-63). 

Walking and cycling accommodate the environment in ways that cars cannot. Speck (2012: 51-63) criticizes what he calls "gizmo green," which is selling and buying gadgets from electric cars to LEED-certified buildings that improve on comparable older products without as much overall impact on the environment as walking. "It turns out that trading all of your incandescent lightbulbs for energy savers conserves as much carbon per year as living in a walkable neighborhood does each week." He quotes Witold Rybczynski, author of Makeshift Metropolis: "[A] solar-heated house in the suburbs is still a house in the suburbs, and if you have to drive to it--even in a Prius--it's hardly green."

But hybrids are only one trend in American vehicles. Without the high gas prices we had ten years ago, vehicle sizes in America and elsewhere are gigantizing. As Andrew Simms of the New Weather Institute in Britain says, "One of advertising's biggest manipulations has persuaded urban families that it's perfectly 'normal' to go shopping in a two-tonne truck" (Harrabin 2021). 

I'm glad walking and cycling to work lessens my impact on the environment, and helps to develop community feeling in our area. But, as I said, mostly I do it because it feels good.

SOURCES

Randolph T. Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy (MIT Press, 2006) 

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage, 1961)

Eric O. Jacobsen, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Baker Academic, 2012)

Jonathan F.P. Rose, The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life (Harper Wave, 2016)

Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (Scribner, 2010)

Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)

POST SCRIPT

This is based on my personal experiences, which are as an able-bodied person... for the time being anyway. I do not for a moment want anyone to think that making a city more walkable does not also help those with disabilities. See this Strong Towns interview with Heidi Johnson-Wright, an Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator in Florida (Quednau 2018).