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community development Archives - ChangingMedia

Weird Before It Was Cool

By | Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, ChangeEngine challenged us to come up with a tagline for Baltimore. The one I chose was a spin on the Keep Austin Weird campaign:

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Keep Austin Weird is a slogan created by Red Wassenich and adopted by the Austin Independent Business Alliance to promote local business in Austin, Texas. It has been seen as a huge success in celebrating the city’s tolerance, innovation, and local flavor. The campaign has spawned hundreds of knock-offs including Keep Portland Weird, Keep Ashville Weird, and even the small town in Virginia where I am currently writing this has a Keep Staunton Weird campaign.

While I love the celebration of quirk, seeing the campaign through the lens of Baltimore brings some interesting questions to light that I am going to explore in a three part series. Over the next weeks I will look at the Keep Austin Weird campaign and ask three key questions:

  1. Who gets to define weird?
  2. Who benefits from weird?
  3. How can we celebrate a weird economy?

The first question hit me when I was reading Lindsey Davis’ blog this week on “Embracing the Noise.” Often times the “Keep Weird” campaigns focus on businesses or festivals that define the city but in reality some of our favorite things about our locale is the people you find on the streets. The “Oh Baltimore” moments people have shared this past week with ChangeEngine show a side of Baltimore often not embraced by people who try to brand our city, but nevertheless are one of the reasons we stay.

This brings me to my first question: who gets to define weird? One of the criticism of the Keep Portland Weird campaign is that it only celebrates the young Portlandia generation and not the original residents of the Oregon town. Most campaigns generally only celebrate brick and mortar local businesses, excluding hustlers like the amazing makeshift market that appears daily on the corner of 25th and North. Keep Weird campaigns tend to focus on gentrified areas where local businesses thrive and problems are kept at bay.

We often deny that weird can sometimes be uncomfortable. The man who shouts at you for no apparent reason, the group of loiterers who mingle at the bus stop on the corner, the person who asks you for money every time you leave the grocery store are all part of the city too but rarely are they symbols of any Keep Weird campaign. This is why I love guest blogger Devan Southerland’s love note to Lexington Market. When you watch the lost tourist souls, bravely venturing from the Inner Harbor, their wide eyes desperately trying to get a Findley’s crab cake, you realize like tourists in every city they fail to see what truly makes this city incredible. It is not the crab cake that defines Baltimore, it is the people you have to weave through to get there.

In Baltimore everyone defines our city. It reminds me of a line from “Good Morning Baltimore” in John Waters’ Hairspray:

There’s the flasher who lives next door
There’s the bum on his bar room stool
They wish me luck as I go to school.”

It seems like Baltimore has always been defined by its more seedy elements. After all, our most famous resident died in a gutter. The most popular TV show about the city is The Wire putting the city’s problems and complexities in full view. This is why most people outside of the city give me a skeptical look when I describe the city as magical. On the surface Baltimore doesn’t seems like the king of weird. We have nothing to compare to South by Southwest, we’re not the live music capital of the world, we don’t have a robust local business scene, and while growing everyday our population of hipsters has not yet sufficiently taken over the city to turn it into the next weird colony.

What we do have is a redefinition of weird that is more than a celebration of gentrified funkiness. Our “Oh Baltimore” can be simultaneously uncomfortable and endearing. It is a city where “the sketchy” part of town is only two blocks away from “the nice” part of town and no one can hide from our city’s problems. As with most major cities we have our divisions and deep rooted problems, yet unlike most cities our grit is what makes us iconic. Our weird is what unites us. It doesn’t solely reside in AVAM or MICA or Hampden, it is on every corner, it relaxes on stoops, it dies in gutters, it lives in bustling markets. That’s because Baltimore was weird before it was cool and we’ll be weird long after.

Beyond the Band Aid

By | The Good Plan | No Comments

Become Obsolete. In the fall of 2011 I heard Jay Parkinson of Hello Health speak at TedXMidAtlantic on the integration of technology and healthcare access. The entire talk was engaging, but those two words struck me: “become obsolete.”

That’s it. Engage in a way so that you aren’t needed anymore. Heal the source of the problem instead of sticking a band-aid on the wound. The difficult part is that our society often caters to the band aid approach. For if we’re no longer needed, how will we pay the rent? It’s a challenge we need the courage to tackle.

The key to becoming obsolete is identifying the problem, and then identifying its root. In the field of community development, problem identification often revolves around need, which in turn breaks down to perceived versus actual need. The difference between these needs is crucial to placemaking and community development.

Perhaps as an outsider, you’re frustrated by the lack of street signs and navigation in an area. You perceive the need as signage, to facilitate clear routes and to make the place easier for outsiders to visit. The residents, however, do not drive. They don’t need street signs — they know where they’re going and how to get from point A to B on foot or via public transit. What they need, in fact, are streetscapes that make walking safer and sheltered bus stops. The actual need is to make their pedestrian and public transit-heavy way of life safer and more convenient. This actual need is the solution to a sustainable and strong neighborhood, rather than a quick fix to attract the occasional passer-by.

I think of perceived and actual need in direct relation to the latest spike in Baltimore’s crime statistics. Every morning I check my twitter feed and my heart breaks a little bit. Today it was the recap of three overnight shootings. The morning updates of death and violence continue to pop up, and can be explained as simply as, something, somewhere, is broken. From what I understand, police are all over the western district right now, as their presence is expected to deter crime from taking place. While I have only headlines and crime maps to inform me of these trends in violence, my assumption is that their presence isn’t working. If it were, my Twitter feed would be silent. Their presence would, in fact, become obsolete. Maybe the perceived need for a police presence isn’t meeting the actual need, which may be something else entirley.

In graduate school I learned of the concept of infinite regress — the idea that we can always blame one more person for a perceived fault. For example, perhaps it’s not you fault there’s a hole in your shirt, it’s probably the fault of the manufacturer for using low grade fabric. Or maybe it’s the fault of the workers who produce the shirt for the manufacturer. Or it’s the fault of the boss who directs the workers who… you catch my drift. We have an innate need to point a figure and direct blame — primarily, I would assume, because we feel a need to fix the broken piece. In all of our professions, our job is to identify the problem so we can fix it. We exist, I would hope, to make things better.

This past week at Ignite Baltimore, a city employee stood up and expressed the desire to be innovative, but the inability to do so. Again, I was crushed. The constraints institutions put on employees to maintain the status quo doesn’t foster the development of new ideas or the ability to solve old problems. One of my favorite stories came out of Victoria, British Columbia two years ago, when officers began to carry lollipops in order to placate rowdy bar-goers or loiterers. Not only is it difficult to yell with a lollipop in your mouth, but fewer words led to fewer altercations, the sugar was calming, and the ‘pacifier effect’ seemed to steady those who may have been riled up.

We need the infrastructure to try new things and the courage to not be needed anymore. Doing more of the same, like increasing police presence, won’t ever be a long-term solution to crime. If you always do what you always do, you’ll always get what you’ve always got, and what we’ve currently got is far from optimal.

IMAGE CREDIT. Hasdai Westbrook