growing a city

61st Street Garden, Hyde Park/WoodlawnMonday night was the first community meeting I’ve attended since starting at the Metropolitan Planning Council.  The site in question is in the South Loop, and MPC is part of a collaboration with a few other Chicago NPOs helping a community plan a new park in a strange empty lot near the intersection of two highways, alongside a Metra track, and next to a school, CHA housing project, and a new loft apartment building.  

(The lofts, ironically, are called the Opera Lofts, named after their former tenants, the Civic Opera.  When I came to Chicago during my sophomore year at Kenyon, some key friends and I had a bit of an unexpected adventure wandering through what we had thought at the time was very sketchy Southside Chicago, looking for a warehouse Opera sale of some sort in this building.  I remember thinking we were so very far south, that we’d traveled miles and miles away from my “stomping grounds,” if that’s even possible as a rare visitor.  Now it’s essentially downtown to me, almost 30 blocks north of home.)

The meeting Monday was at once frustrating and eye-opening.  It was a struggle to get any feedback or real ideas out of the dozen attendees, nearly all of them residents of the CHA’s Dearborn Homes projects next to the school.  After the meeting, I took the bus home (changing at a very un-welcoming intersection at 51st and State, waiting for the number 15 with a young woman who asked me what I was doing out so late - it was just before 7 p.m. although decidedly dark - and telling me to be careful out here) with a mind full of positive thoughts about what MPC and NeighborSpace and Openlands are doing, their hard work to get a garden into this empty lot.  I struggled - and still struggle - with my conflicting thoughts about whether the community will step up and provide a leader to actually make it all happen and keep the garden clean and kept up.  I wonder if it is worth all of the time I (and Karin, I see what she is doing, too) spend sitting at a computer in an office making it happen.  Is there a way to get this done that is more fun??  

To add to my thoughts about this process of little bits of communication and publicity and administrative nitpicking all coming together into an event and hopefully eventually a garden, Dad sent me an article by Irénée Scalbert called “Parklife” that got me thinking about the creative process, cities, and modern urban spaces.  

The essay starts by presenting two thoughts that really clicked with me, and made me slog through the middle, which got a bit too philosophical.  The first good thought was that we (modern Westerners, I assume he means) have an idea that good public spaces are epitomized by grand, open piazzas the likes of which we see in classical European cities.  He states it as “the expectation that one or several sides of a public space will be enclosed by a civic institution.”  It’s true - the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Piazza Pubblico in Siena, the countless smaller piazzas in front of neighborhood churches in Italy that are such integral parts of my childhood growing up wandering great urban spaces.  

His second good thought is really more of a suggestion, an appreciation of what I, too, appreciate so much in Sicily and Istanbul, in particular: the fact that “the signs of decrepitude were displayed without shame.”  The youthful spirit of the people is by no means diminished by the fact that their surroundings are largely crumbling from age or simply from disrepair.  

It’s the end of the essay that gets really to my heart, though - he argues that the grand old piazzas that were the centers of great urban spaces in the past are now obsolete, and that the great urban centers are now gardens and parks, public spaces filled with vegetation.  I like this image of the new city being focused on parks - although it does make New York City a bit too perfect an image for my liking, being so full of decrepitude and with Central Park at its heart. 

It’s the work in the garden that he describes, quoting J.B. Jackson, that really hit me: 

“...the garden, no matter what its size, called for incessant, detailed, diversified work - a series of small chores, many of them demanding skill and judgement … each plant, each vine, each tree had to be put in the ground, cultivated, pruned, grafted, transplanted and harvested in a special way and at a special moment, and all this was done by hand or by the use of small and simple tools…”  

There is an admiration here for what I have only recently discovered is what makes me most truly happy: careful, creative, manual work.  And Scalbert not only recognizes the essential nature of this kind of work, building upon each previous small victory, he admires it as I do, the hard work dedication to a place and task and accumulation of knowledge, wisdom even.  “Gardening consists of a vast accumulation of inherited habits, every one of them buried in the depths of material life.  Gardens, like cities, are the sites of innumerable inventions.”  

Here, he got at what I attempt so often to describe most admiringly about Turkey - the resourcefulness, spunk, and passion in every Turk I know.  

How and why did that energy get lost in this process of which I am a part, MPC’s tedious navigation of endless networks of people and papers and administrative processes?

And, so, all of this to say that Irénée Scalbert has succeeded in applying the methods I love to the ideas I love. 

Maybe I should give gardening another shot...

Comments

[L Samuels]

Hi Annie - So good to see what you are up to (your dad is a wonder at making connections across space, is he not?). Your post reminds me of many things, but one is immediate and in your own front yard. Have you made it to the show at the Graham Foundation? Or are you on their list? You should be. ACTIONS: What you can do with the city is there now, supported by a host of talks. I haven't seen it - though I would love to - but I purchased the book from the cca and get so inspired by the various craziness it holds. Your wish for a more fun process is most certainly fulfillable! And not only will it change your perspective, it sounds like the perspectives of those close by might be up for some changing too. Maybe they are not excited by the prospects of gardening and long term maintenance and the baggage that holds for folks who have never been allowed a life of leisure. What are other kinds of nature, of fun, of play, of outsideness that might be more compatible? The artpark wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it tried hard to be inclusive and flexible and widely accommodating by being a sports field and an art project and a place to sit and relax and a mini-garden. You are right, though, sometimes it takes a big personality to motivate. Our project didn't really work until we all felt equal, until the leadership on all sides were nose to nose, all of us on the ground and dirty. The day we took out a roller and started painting lines, people came and talked and it became really fun. Keep me updated. And I would love a copy of the article you mention, parklife, it possible. Congrats on your new Chicago life. LS.

[Annie]

Yes, I saw and loved the Graham Foundation exhibit - visited, in fact, with my mom and dad when they were here in October.
Funny I didn't bring that specific set of projects forward in my thinking about "Parklife" because you're right, it's definitely relevant, and an optimistic possibility, inspiration for work making cities better that is all-around fun!