The house slide above Terwilliger

Hyper-local can be summed up easily as ‘all the news in your zip code.’ Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson captured it nicely too in a post titled The Vanishing Point Theory of News. The idea of hyper-local is further validated by the success of sites such as Yelp and Outside.in; they drill down to the zip code level to bring us all the news that’s fit to print, or not as the case may be.

I was hiking with my dog in my Hillsdale neighborhood yesterday and some thoughts percolated to top of mind – one being that hyper-local is an awesome idea yet that thought was immediately tempered by the next; hyper-localized information means having easy access to all the news in our communities, we are made aware, therefore we have to accept responsibility for what happens in our communities. There will be no excuses.

I could have stopped right there, it would have been a good Twitter-esque moment. But no. I have actually been paying attention to what goes on in my neighborhood and it’s not always pretty..

From tragedy and despair to new thinking.

No vehicles, a blessing

My regular hike leads from my home in the residential neighborhoods of Portland’s West Hills, down narrow musty lanes and streets to Terwilliger Boulevard [known to locals as the Terwilliger Highway - you may already sense where this is going...]. Where Terwilliger crosses the SW Capitol Highway the road is now closed to vehicles but not to hikers and bicyclists. A few weeks ago a house slid down the hillside that I can see ahead of me taking two others off their foundations as it cascaded toward Terwilliger. Road closed. Despair for the families involved but thankfully no injuries.

The house collapse has created a chain of events that can be seen as an opportunity.

First and foremost, as vehicles can no longer drive along the boulevard it is possible for hikers and bikers to enjoy the serenity of walking Terwilliger’s tree-lined curves without inhaling exhaust fumes or having to be constantly vigilant of motorists speeding to work. Remove the automobile from the equation and we are suddenly back on the path to nature. Of course the traffic has to go somewhere; the detour funnels it through Hillsdale along the increasingly congested Capitol Highway, up through the dangerous cross-section at Sunset Blvd and the Wilson High School entrance, and on back down to the severed umbilical that is Terwilliger where commuters, one to each car, can speed off toward OHSU.

Here’s the opportunity for Hillsdale as I see it: make things difficult for drivers.

Two fairly recent developments in Hillsdale [in the last 4 years] changed the character of the neighborhood – one positively, one negatively. The Hillsdale Library, completed in 2004, is both architecturally and holistically a perfect example of how Hillsdale should be developed. The Watershed building on the other hand is just the opposite. And yet the library, as good as it is, is not perfect.

The library is a wonderful building to look at – a mix of modern eco-friendly materials, an open inviting design that allows complete transparency throughout and although it is a thoroughly modern building it has hints of neo-classical architecture, a good mix for housing the books within. Its problem? It has added to the areas automobile congestion. Drivers attempting to park on the streets or enter the parking lot below the building create mayhem just a half block from the already overloaded intersection at Capitol Highway and Sunset Blvd. And why the library’s underground parking entrance was placed right opposite the parking lots for the Hillsdale Post Office and Liquor Store is beyond me. The pedestrian crosswalk indiscriminately dropped at the corner of the library at the junction of SW DeWitt St has to be the most risky crossing in Hillsdale for the old and young alike.

Meanwhile the Watershed building at the southern end of Hillsdale’s strip malls is an eyesore. [Calling this building the Watershed is apt. Here's one definition of the name's meaning - A critical point marking a change in course or development.] There is nothing to love about this building. Although the ground beneath it was once a brownfield it was at least an open space that afforded a view across Bertha Court to the well-designed public housing just off Bertha Boulevard. The Watershed was perceived with a noble cause – a 51-unit senior affordable housing project – and is also an environmentally-friendly building but it is architecturally dull and has a ludicrous light tower perched on its NW corner that proclaims Hillsdale – such a folly and a waste of money. A retail condominium has lain empty since the buildings’ completion and the low retaining wall that runs along Bertha Court opposite provides a perfect sanctuary for the nicotine-addicted residents to sit and smoke throughout the day. Smoking is a choice and I’m fine with that but it’s a shame that as our local children walk to school they must pass these smokers. This building does not represent the future of Hillsdale.

Back to the problem of cars.

Another Hillsdale development with potential is the advent of the local Farmer’s Market. Along with the Food Front Cooperative taking over the old Wild Oats market, the local community now has easy access to organic foods which in many cases are locally grown. Yet once more the local “planners” failed to estimate the amount of traffic that the Farmer’s Market would create. The entrance to the market across from SW Sunset Blvd and Capitol Highway is now as congested and dangerous to pedestrians on Sundays as it is on weekdays. I don’t see this as progress; the car has dominion over the pedestrian and bicyclist in Hillsdale. Those that think this way will reduce our vibrant urban community to that of a bland, automobile-saturated sprawl reminiscent of the worst of any of Portland’s suburbs. Why doesn’t the Farmers Market and its boosters provide shuttle buses, bike racks and safe pedestrian access?

Shopping local, supporting growers and eating locally grown organic foods are all fine acts but not at the expense of clogging up the community with more cars. Talk about carbon footprint.

To add salt to the wound our hyper-local newspaper the Southwest Community Connection, the same paper that insists on calling the strip malls along Capitol Highway ‘Hillsdale Town Center,’ recently had an article titled ‘A New Look For The Heart of Hillsdale.’ This ‘new look’ according to the architecture and planning firm SERA is a way to “strengthen the qualities of what is Hillsdale” and “to over time create a more focused activity center or plaza.” Business folks in the district are all over it. As happens all too often in Hillsdale, business and automobiles trump residents and community.

The plan as presented by SERA is to create three high-density commercial and residential zones by extending roads through the middle of what is known as the “Sunset Triangle,” some green space that is bordered by Sunset Blvd, Capitol Highway and SW 18th Drive. But don’t worry, the designers “imagine the roads to be tree-lined boulevards with a European air.” If they truly imagined a “European air” they would understand that in Europe buses, light rail, pedestrians and cyclists predominate in towns and villages and many cities – not the automobile. The ‘European’ tag is just pure marketing fluff, an attempt to soften the blow that this development would create in the community.

I presume SERA has already asked the question of Hillsdale’s residents, [although I wasn't included], of what exactly are the strengths of Hillsdale that this phrase invokes – “strengthen the qualities of what is Hillsdale.” If they had asked me I would have these words for its qualities – urban, green, democratic, aesthetic, forward-thinking, family-friendly, bike and pedestrian-friendly, educated, local, supportive….. If they had asked me of my dislikes they would include the ugly buildings that dot Capitol Highway such as the abandoned gas station next to Baskins Robbins, the bizarre architecture that houses the Mexican restaurant Casa Colima, Starbucks [Baker and Spice next door is local and has better coffee,] the traffic, lack of bike lanes and most importantly the nightmare that is the junction at SW Sunset and Capitol Highway – will it take a pedestrian or bicyclist’s death to make someone pay attention?

Nature has a way of dealing. Capitol Hwy in December

Hillsdale simply does not need more businesses and homes crammed into its green spaces. It is hypocritical folly to suggest that the very same decisions that create suburban blight should be made on behalf of Hillsdale’s residents. Hillsdale also does not need to create more roads for automobiles. In fact the community should be doing the exact opposite and work on creating more bike and pedestrian-friendly streets in our neighborhoods.

Here’s a quick example – SW Sunset Blvd. The city should remove all the “traffic calming speed bumps” as they do not work. Drivers have discovered that they are low enough that by speeding up they can clear them more conveniently! The city should put in either stop signs at every junction or traffic circles to slow cars down. It could also narrow the street by putting in chicanes that slow traffic by funneling and are used very efficiently in Europe. Pedestrians and bicyclists should be considered more important than cars…

The Hillsdale District, as it stands today, is a model community. It has the potential to be as strong a destination as the Hawthorne, Clinton and Belmont Districts in SE Portland. It is an urban oasis with charm and character yet it is being blighted by the automobile and wrong-headed thinking such as the idea of under-grounding our utility cables. The money that would be spent on a pet project like that, one that benefits no one, should be put toward a holistic and sensible urban community plan. One that reduces traffic and improves the safety and quality of life for Hillsdale’s residents and those that are attracted to the district as they go about their activities that support local businesses. Filling in our green spaces with more roads and buildings, even if they were “tree-lined boulevards with a European air,” is simply wrong. Cars should come last.

Surely the community of Hillsdale understands that creating more roads and streets for vehicles that burn scarce fossil fuels is a redundant idea – an idea that is not aligned with Hillsdale today nor one that should be in its future.

[where: 6344 SW Capitol Highway, OR 97239]

The Tower of Babel

Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.

Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.

As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’

He argues that one of the chief side effects of the move to suburbanism is “the cultural destruction…especially the loss of knowledge, tradition, skill, custom and vernacular wisdom in the art of city-making that was thrown in the dumpster of history….”

A city is not just a series of streets and avenues with buildings on either side, a city is people, culture, society and the networks that form to bind those societies together into communities. The suburbs were literally a dream, an idea that General Motors had of a drive-in utopia in its plan for a World of Tomorrow. Kunstler goes on to point out the folly of the “Edge City,” a term coined by the writer Joel Garreau. Kunstler says “I essay to show how Atlanta took the urban model of car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous, and in my view, terminal stage. With Atlanta, you can forego agonizing over the future, because the present doesn’t even work there.” As he points out “our human ecologies – namely our towns and cities – remain devalued, depopulated and decivilized.”

In America we prefer landscape over urbanism. What then now as our dependence upon oil, refined as gasoline for cars that transport one person at a time from these suburbs to the cities, proves the folly of these far-flung suburbs? Will we see a move toward urban vitality? A migration back to the city?

Government spending at any level, state or local, does little to help. We need to “nurture the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing” – writes Douglas Rae, the Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, in his book, City; Urbanism and Its End. “Small scale retailing, neighborhood clubs, informal enforcement of sidewalk civility and new urbanist design may be the keys to the future.”

I agree with Rae on the idea of “nurturing unplanned civic engagements” as he puts it but that’s as far as I would go. The rest of his thought sounds like the issue of we humans being in control of our destinies again, trying to have the answer that is beyond nature, beyond what we actually do when we congregate in cities. Our desire for urban centres always seem to be about ‘order’ or ‘cleanliness’ and ‘organization.’ So on one hand we have the thinkers – the planners and the architects, and on the other – the citizens who actually inhabit the space that we call city. What we might call the ‘Few and the Many.’

Alongside a piece by the New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott, called Metropolis Now, where he writes about the idea of how yesterday’s film sets became today’s cities, there is a sidebar that takes some lines from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” – “The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” There’s that word again, dream.

We humans dream. We dream of controlling nature, we dream of saving the earth, we dream of organizing our cities. Those dreaming deny the fact that cities live and breathe. Not the concrete architecture, not the buildings – the people that inhabit them. When someone talks of Rome having a ’soul, a feeling’ they are misinterpreting the difference between the city and its cultural makeup; people can be said to have souls and feelings, we ‘know’ this – buildings don’t have soul and feelings.

As Fernando Pessoa writes – “Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are can you talk about their feelings. To talk about the soul of flowers, stones and rivers, is to talk about yourself, about your delusions. Thank God stones are just stones, and rivers just rivers, and flowers just flowers.” We dream and we delude ourselves.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class dreams of organizing urban centres [which he correctly identifies as 'place'] around the idea of a mythical “creative class” who are bound by the idea of the “three T’s,” Technology, Talent and Tolerance. This dream involves cities having a strong technology base, a “creative” class as he calls it, and a strong gay community. And of course the idea he spins is that to grow a city’s economic base it should invest in nurturing the “three T’s.” Once again – The Few and the Many. Planners and architects can no more decide what a city’s culture will be than we know that a stone has feeling.

The fabric of a city is its population. Like a bee hive [architecture] or an ant colony [social network], natural rules of engagement spring up through the daily interaction of those who inhabit a city. They commune. They gather in tribes in their ‘places.’ They share information, ideas, things they like. They become less ’selfish.’ They are city.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs – “Anyone who wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

Most large cities have a zoo.

Listen to and download Psycho Drift. Shriekback – Psycho Drift

For references –
References:

James Howard Kunstler – The City in Mind. Published 2001 by The Free Press.
Joel Garreau – Edge City
Douglas W. Rae – City; Urbanism and Its End. Published 2003 by Yale University Press.
Richard Florida – The Rise of the Creative Class. Published 2002 by Basic Books.
A.O.Scott – Metropolis Now. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fritz Lang – Metropolis
Enrique Peñalosa – Man With a Plan. Published in the New York Times magazine June 6th 2008.
Fernando Pessoa
John Gray – Straw Dogs. Published 2002 by Granta Books.
Solipsism
Shriekback – Sacred City [Compact Disc]. Released by World Domination Records 1992.
Barry Andrews – Lyrics to Psycho Drift.
Peter Carey – 30 Days in Sydney.