Resourcefulness: it’s what I say I love most about Turkish people. It’s what I miss in the sterile communities I see in community development projects, even the ones I am helping to develop at MPC. It’s what I feel is so often being trained out of us in our laziness - we have come to expect luxuries like cars and buses running on time and not having to wait in line at the bank and paying your bills online and reliably and ordering food and getting what you know you will get and expecting that there will always be ripe bananas and your favorite kind of yogurt at the grocery store.
MPC and the Chicago Dept of Transportation ran a workshop last week on designing complete streets (I designed a fancy fact sheet, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, or just want to see how proficient I am becoming at lining up boxes of text in InDesign, check it out!). Complete Streets sound like a great idea - make streets safe for all people by making sure everyone knows when and where they’re supposed to move. '
Copenhagen Cycle Chic
But I have two major problems with them, I realized.
1. Designing complete streets STILL means designing for cars, it just means designing so that the cars don’t hurt or kill so many people.
2. There are way too many rules!
This is the foundation of my frustrations these days. Relegating everyone into their own spaces, their own channels marked with a dotted white line or a painted bicycle and arrow or a raised sidewalk and blinking white walking man in a crosswalk may contribute to life on the street, but it certainly won’t guarantee vitality. And really, where else in the world will a broken sidewalk prevent people from walking down the street? If there’s something worth getting to, people will get there.
And so, perhaps the problem doesn’t really lie in crappy streets designed for four lanes of fast-moving traffic. Of course, that’s an issue, but it’s a symptom of cities designed too strictly, of a lack of open spaces filled spontaneously by peddlers or musicians or little gardens, if only transient, cities where every space is zoned to such a detail that all dentist offices the country over are as sterile as the next, and you’ll never have the idiosyncratic hubs of commercial activity, of friendly competition that exists in the blocks in Istanbul for instance, where you find all of the teapot manufacturers, or bike shops. (That’s a run-on sentence, but why not let a few of those slide, too, in appreciation of the frustration I feel with staying between the lines.)
I’m wishing for something that runs counter to so many concepts taken for granted - we should be able to get from one place to another reliably, in a relatively straight line, we shouldn’t build factories next to elementary schools and enormous Big Boxes next to quiet historic neighborhoods. Sure, these are things I want, too, but I think the rules have gotten out of hand. Is there a way to get people to appreciate the unexpected?
I’ve quoted him before, but I think a reminder of my dad’s wise words is warranted: “We need a language of enthusiasm for life's casual moments and spontaneous encounters." Who’s with me for enthusiasm and spontaneity?
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:18PM 