Tag

planning Archives - Page 2 of 2 - ChangingMedia

Apr 01
0

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
Mar 18
0

Temporary Event, Lasting Impression

By | Design, The Good Plan | No Comments

With the increasing popularity of urban athletic events, pop-up dinners, and creative ways to use existing space, cities are volunteering to temporarily host unprecedented amounts of people. Comparable to the Olympics, but at a smaller scale, this temporary use of space doesn’t often require the building of venues, but does demand solid infrastructure. Whether relying on transit systems, parking, plumbing, or electricity, the performance of aging systems become strained; think of the system as a sorority house where everyone plugs in their hair dryers at the same time. This sudden demand of energy, more often than not, causes infrastructure shut-down – too much is not always a good thing.

After the DC Rock N Roll marathon on Saturday, the line for the Metro was a half block long and growing. Thirty thousand runners sparked fifty-two street closures around the city. As I boarded my train with a New York City rush hour caliber crowd, I silently hoped my train was powerful enough to carry all of us to our destinations safely. It was, and we made it home without issue – but it did make me wonder when it is worth overriding the built urban system at the cost of hosting an event.

I had a contrasting experience in Philadelphia last year when I attended a Diner En Blanc. This pop-up dinner event where over a thousand people converge, dine, and dance in a public space, was executed beautifully. As we gathered into different parts around the city and made our way to Logan Circle, I was sure we would get disciplined at some point for being too loud, needing to leave, or swimming and dancing in the fountain after dinner – there was none of it. Philadelphia simply let us enjoy ourselves, and I came away with wholehearted thanks to the local government and the police department for allowing us to use the urban space in a way it had never been used before.

Participants of temporary events are left with an impression created not only from how the infrastructure performs, but the location in which the event is held. When holding an event in a city, organizers would presumably want to portray the place in the most favorable light. In the same way you clean your house before having guests over, you want to impress people with the setting and the surroundings – so how do you choose what to show off?

This introduces the element of access and marketability. While some areas may be in greater need than others for temporary visitors, publicity, and community building, they may also not be the areas to which you want to attract outsiders. Philadelphia may have given many of us a different impression had we not been dancing under the moonlight in a public fountain outside an art museum. How would my experience have been different if I were in an overgrown field, surrounded by the same 1,300 people but with a backdrop of vacant town homes or public housing? What if I were in a community garden surrounded by barbed wire? Perhaps my impression of the event would not have changed – but I’m willing to bet it would have.

City planners speak about the importance of access to public spaces and greening, but parks are just the tip of that iceberg. Each community needs space to play and be and go, but we also need to think about what we can see from the park. Looking at homes with cluttered yards gives us the impression we’re in a different place than it would should we look out from a park and see well-maintained residences and freshly painted porches. Attracting outsiders for temporary events provides an opportunity for a city to leave a lasting impression through a snapshot of an experience. Critical thoughts of what our city decides to show the public and what it decides to hide is worthy of analysis, because quite simply a city that decides to host an event directly reflects on the event organizers, as well as the city itself.

Image courtesy of Philly Loves Fun
Feb 04
0

On the Edge of Difference

By | Social Enterprise, The Good Plan | 2 Comments

I would bet many of us have heard the remark, “you’re from Baltimore? Have you seen The Wire?” and I can guarantee you, nothing aggravates me more. The widespread media portrayal of our city implants a preconceived notion we as residents must balance with the greater picture. I have seen The Wire. And while there is lots of truth to the visual disgrace and social injustice captured by HBO, there’s more to Baltimore than Bunk and Bubbles. In our city, poverty is constantly around the corner from stability.

In 2010 I heard community revitalization guru Storm Cunningham speak at TEDxMidAtlantic. Inspired by his approach, I insisted on showing him around when he came to Baltimore in 2011. We looped around the inner harbor and down The Block. With the Pussycat Club providing the appropriate backdrop, he made a remark to the tune of “this is right here? And the harbor is right there? I would have had no idea. They’re just two blocks apart.” We certainly aren’t all crabcakes and waterfront, but we aren’t all Lake Trout and vacants either.

There is often the “out of sight, out of mind” excuse for inaction, yet in the City of Baltimore this is impossible. The social equity discrepancies of the city are perhaps especially jarring because of the proximate adjacencies. It’s hard to find the bad without driving through the good, and vice versa. But I advocate that seeing the other side of the coin can dispel ignorance and foster comprehensive planning.

People proximate to us in place are more likely to have opinions we consider to be valid, though there are only so many recommendations for the familiar. The beauty of distinct neighborhoods is the ability to find the best of something different. Walking outside my census tract I’m opened up to new food, markets, services. The ability to exchange information and break out of sameness is an action any of us can take to transcend the cross-neighborhood divide and enhance and diversify our own community.

Perhaps planning in Baltimore is slow or, dare I say, one-note when it comes to alleviating the impoverished, but by going one street further we can get new references for a world that is not our own, integrating something new, and perhaps eventually, define our neighborhood as one block larger than it used to be.

Jan 21
0

Shoelaces and Car Keys

By | The Good Plan | No Comments

As much as I value the convenience of a parking spot, I resist development efforts that aim to provide more parking. Parking-focused design prevents us from fully embracing a walkable lifestyle and all its benefits to our health, economy and environment. While it is ultimately our responsibility to put on our shoes rather than fill up the gas tank, it is also the responsibility of our cities to make walkability viable – encouraging healthy living and local economic prosperity.

The Atlantic recently published an article on the walking disaster that is America – a disaster brought on by the all-too-prominent mentality that places walking at the lower end of the priority spectrum. Those misplaced priorities are evident in our own neighborhoods. Last week I returned home to East Canton. It took me a minute before realizing our two-way street with parallel parking on either side had disappeared. In its place remained a one-way street with back-in parking on one side and parallel parking on the other.

It seems like each day a formerly two-way street surprises me with a ‘do not enter’ sign, and a sea of cars backed onto the sidewalk. While I understand one-way streets and back-in parking provide for traffic calming and more parking spaces, it looks unappealing, and providing more spaces does nothing to discourage people from driving. I compare this approach to road widening – if you build more lanes, you’re just encouraging more traffic.

Living in downtown Baltimore, many of us at least have the option of walking to and from the grocery store, the bar, public transit, restaurants, and drugstores. We worry less about not being able to get milk in a snowstorm or not having our car plowed out the next day because we can walk to get things while those in the suburbs cannot. And yet even in those more walkable areas, the car mentality holds us hostage. I have friends in North Canton and Federal Hill who would rather drive when they could walk, but often won’t venture out for fear of losing their parking spot.

Until those creating policy and directing construction crews start rethinking urban access to help us rethink the use of our car keys, our walkable road to social change will remain very, very rocky.

Nov 12
0

The Culture of Structure

By | The Good Plan | No Comments

New York and high density cities are no longer jarring. I’ve become accustomed to buildings sitting upon the lap of their neighbors and sightlines interrupted only by intersections. While you may argue all architecture is terribly diverse and everything should be appreciated, I’m here to tell you that in my mind, when skyscraper sits adjacent to skyscraper, structure seems to run together. When everything is so similar, especially in big cities, the beauty of anomaly and sense of rarity are lost. I cease to be awed.

Read More

Nov 08
0

A Four Point Plan for the Next Four Years of Education Policy

By | Education | No Comments
  1. Decentralize Funding – Bloated bureaucracy and red tape at the district level creates unnecessary logjams at the school and classroom levels. As teachers and students move increasingly towards individualized and highly personalized teaching and learning, the system must decentralize decision-making about curriculum, funding, hiring, technology, professional development, and evaluation to the school and classroom level so that education professionals can make decisions that are appropriate for their school and students. In Baltimore, CEO of Public Schools Andres Alonso decentralized school funding and gave principals full autonomy over their school budgets. This allows principals to collaborate with teachers and the community to assess the needs of the school and prioritize funding dollars to provide the appropriate resources. Furthermore, by valuing every teacher salary in the budget at the mean cost to the district, this budgeting structure has completed eliminated Last-In-First-Out hiring practices.
    Read More
Oct 29
0

The Good Plan – Defining Social Architecture

By | The Good Plan | No Comments

Photo: The Economist

The concept of social architecture came to me in a travelers cliché. I was jogging pre-dawn, weaving around shopkeepers, bypassing courtyards in tai chi synchronicity, and comparing this quiet Shanghai morning to a Beijing run two days prior. Shanghai was a comfortable gander through city outskirts; Beijing had Olympic sport potential. Screw the running, I’ll give you a medal for getting through the streets with limbs and lungs intact. But the differences between the cities rested on more than just ease of movement. The elements of inequality, rapid development, stagnation, and transit each played a role in my ability to move and breathe freely.

In 2005, Beijing and Shanghai had comparable populations, but the planning of the cities was drastically different. Shanghai had predictable street connections and clear sidewalks. Housing was set back from the road and there were no insurmountable gates on medians or sidewalks. Where I ran, there were no construction sites. Youth had moved out of the area and towards center city opportunity, leaving behind parents, now grandparents. Beijing was perpetually sleepless and never silent. Migrant workers were active at all times of the day, constructing skyscrapers and polluting the air with shards of metal and fluorescent sparks. I dodged around bicycles and cars stopping and moving without semblance of pattern. Pollution was thick and noise was deafening. There was always, always somebody in my way.

As I dodged around buildings,  I realized each piece of architecture impacted the behavior of everyone around it. Whether space, building, park, or sidewalk, social ramifications are created by each object we must move through, around, under, and over. In the following column, I expect to further explore what I call ‘human architecture.’ Architecture and planning projects don’t stop at the site; they can perpetuate or alleviate inequality and exclusion, crime and safety, healthy lifestyles and opportunity. Through the eyes of an individual who recognizes the effect plans have on social issues, I intend to focus on the social ramifications of planning projects and architectural undertakings. The world is developing rapidly, and while some projects are good and some projects are bad, I believe all of them inherently matter.

Next time: I am blown away by the size of buildings in Washington DC. While I’ve normalized to the size of NYC skyscrapers or extreme urban density, there’s something about DC architecture which never ceases to catch me off guard. In the spirit of the recent election I am inspired to reflect on big buildings and what they mean in terms of identity and accessibility.