Creative but chicken?

Interesting back-to-back editorial pieces in The Plain Dealer yesterday: Brent Larkin ’s story about the growing  panic among Cleveland City Council members over the fact that that their city is declining more and more rapidly, they know radical change is needed, but no one’s stepping up to make it happen;  and Harold L. Sirkin’s commentary (apparently as yet unavailable on Cleveland.com) about the political and bureaucratic cement shoes our nation has strapped to its efforts to get anything done. 

Both are about political will and courage. But what they really address is the fear of change.

 No matter how creative we are, we’ll never move forward unless we have the guts to act on our ideas.  What is everyone so afraid of? And why is this fear part of our biology?

Is innovation wiping out reading?

Fascinating story in Duke Magazine about the abrupt changes taking place in the culture of reading. I think it’s especially interesting that not until the very end of the discussion, and then only obliquely, did anyone touch on the idea of reading as an aesthetic experience involving the senses as well as the intellect.

Is reading only a process of absorbing written information or does the visual design of the book, the feel of natural materials such as leather and paper, the smell of ink, the gentle glow of light on pages (not from them) add up to something richer, more focused and more deeply informing  than characters on a screen?

Grassroots: The agent of green change

How do you systematically redesign a place that’s already filled up and covered over with stuff you may not want, but can’t easily get rid of? The answer is: Maybe you don’t. And that’s no fun to hear when all you really want to do is level the mess, haul the rubble away and start all over.

I talk not of teen bedrooms, but of whole cities and regions. It’s hard to drive through any older population center and not feel as if a good mass implosion were the only answer for all the crummy parts, followed by an invitation to some latter-day Baron Haussmann to come in and reshape the whole metropolis from the sewer pipes on up (ignoring the distasteful fact that you’d also need an Emperor Napoleon III to decree and pay for the whole project on the backs of the working poor).

But Terry Schwarz thinks that’s the wrong approach. The interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative , who’s been working on Cleveland’s land-use and environmental problems with Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and the City of Cleveland as part of the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland  project, suggests that the grassroots are literally and figuratively the answer.

She sees good change coming to cities such as Cleveland in two ways. One is the actual grassroots: developing a flexible framework of strategies for returning key areas, such as watersheds, to the green states and purposes nature intended, so “we can more easily adapt, grow and shrink.” Two is the metaphorical grassroots: Within the framework, giving ordinary residents the freedom to experiment with ways of cleaning and greening their own lots and reconnecting their neighborhoods to the changed spaces around them.

Land reuse thus becomes – you saw this coming – organic. But it’s not the same thing as just letting the city “return to nature,” Schwarz says.

Thousands of people still live there and can’t be displaced like heads of lettuce just because you need to clean the refrigerator. Plus, grand plans are hugely expensive, logistically complicated and obstructed by people’s ownership of – and emotional ties to – their property. They also can’t anticipate every circumstance and end up being rigid impediments to good sense and individual initiative.

So engaging everyday people in the process of creative change becomes essential – and an opportunity for innovation on every level. (Schwarz reports that a visiting Environmental Protection Agency member took a look at Cleveland and exclaimed, “This is an ecological-restoration bonanza!”) 

More than 50 small pilot projects are already underway in Cleveland neighborhoods, Schwarz says, and they range from restoring a tiny bit of prairie to phytoremediation (planting therapeutic species that will, for instance, clean the soil of heavy metals such as lead) to landscaping on vacant lots to make city blocks look cared-for and so reduce crime.    

Schwarz sees Cleveland’s encircling “Emerald Necklace” of parks eventually turning into a larger green network, an “emerald web” of restored watersheds and tree canopy connected to strings of neighborhood green patches. Though removing structures and creating a lot of green space sounds like a danger to the density a city needs to support public transit and other essential services, Schwarz calls it “managing decline in a way that actually promotes growth” – and cites the city of St. Paul, Minn., where the restored wetland that replaced a failing mall proved so attractive and desirable a spot that new homes were built around the edges of it.

Among planners and environmentalists, there’s a fair amount of argument about what will work best. But as Schwarz notes, the damage to places like Cleveland has already been done; it’s never going to be 1910 and the Midwest’s industrial heyday again. So such cities will have to create the best outcomes that they can with the hands they’ve been dealt.  

“We will have to choose,” she says. “We have to take some risks. There is no model. We have to be the model.”

Shrinking by design: Reinventing civilization for our own survival

Image by Neil Wilkinson

Small is big. But it needs to get bigger.

A lot of people don’t have a clue about this yet – they’re still operating as if the Earth were a planetary version of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea-Party, where anytime they soil or use up the resources on the table in front of them, all they have to do is shout “Clean cups! Clean cups!”, move over a seat and start consuming/defiling a fresh array of china and scones.

But, as Alice asked of the Mad Hatter, “What happens when you come to the beginning again?”  No answer came.

The fact is, we have at long last come to the beginning again. Humankind has depleted or damaged nearly every habitable spot on the planet, not just through appalling ignorance about, and willful disregard for, the places in which we originally lived, but by constantly moving away from our hideous messes to the more pristine land just beyond. And then making more messes.

We’ve destructively expanded so much that we’re running out of everything we need to survive, both physically and economically – including time. So what now?

Luckily, David Beach has more answers than the Mad Hatter. He says we have to reduce – not just our individual consumption, not just our carbon footprint, but also the physical boundaries of the land we use. We have to live differently.

For a long time, the environmental movement has been focused on stopping pollution, said Beach, founder of EcoCity Cleveland  and director of the Green City Blue Lake Institute at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. But that approach goes only so far: With every corner of the planet connected and affected by shared air, water, weather and other natural systems, environmental poisoning can’t be stopped by shutting off some smokestacks or industrial drain pipes here and there, he explained during a recent interview at Green City Blue Lake’s offices. The problem hasn’t been caused by a few industries or nations.

“There’s not a bad guy that you can blame,” Beach said. “”It’s the design of our civilization. The only way to cure that is to have more of a design approach that helps everyone change their lives.”

In cities such as Cleveland, which combine aging industrial cores with suburban sprawl, he said, it’s imperative to have a regional plan that deals with the shifting population, decrepit  and/or abandoned buildings, toxic soil and water, and paved-over environments trapping the area in its physical and economic state of decay. For these metropolitan areas, Beach envisions much smaller, but much more densely populated, urban centers that are livable, walkable, affordable and enticing, with multi-unit residential building in mixed-use neighborhoods full of green spaces and efficient public transit that will entice suburbanites to move back in. That will mean dismantling a lot of foreclosed and emptied-out neighborhoods – not just pulling down and removing unsavable structures, but figuring out what to do with the suddenly vacant land.

A lot of choices exist.  Reforestation, gardens and urban farms, parks: “All of those work for me,” said Jim Rokakis, Cuyahoga County Treasurer and a founder/director of the county’s new Land Bank  . He explained that in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, many neglected old buildings and homes are past saving. Renovation would be prohibitive. Tearing them down is costly, too: With 18,000 homes to remove at $8,000-$10,000 each, it will take upwards of $150 million. The county doesn’t have that kind of money.

But the land bank can take over foreclosed properties, pay down the assumed debt with the $8 million per year in tax collection from the county treasurer’s office, and make the land available for inventive uses, Rokakis said. 

The change that results from land reuse in Cleveland – or Detroit or Miami or any of thousands of cities worldwide – sounds drastic and is. No one wants to have to suffer the kinds of catastrophes that require change on this scale, whether recessions, floods or wars. On the other hand,  no one can deny that catastrophes often eventually lead to rebirths of the best kind, letting redesigned, rebuilt cities and whole nations leap-frog into the future. 

But as Beach said, smart, effective, sustainable, economically positive redesigns can’t happen without regional plans.  Northeast Ohio – and probably a lot of other places –  doesn’t have one.

More about that next time.