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.”

Brats vs. Obama

I’ve about had it with a large part of the American public.

Recent news stories have reported that U.S. President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have dropped considerably. Apparently, growing numbers of citizens are unhappy that the economy isn’t all better yet and have decided that the country is moving in the wrong direction.

Could we please have a survey that determines how many of us think these particular citizens are actually petulant two-year-olds?

They must think Obama is a wizard who has only to wave his wand (Reparo!)  to put the banks and the real-estate market and all the lost jobs back in place, good as new, instead of a regular human being who’s having to undo at least eight years’ worth of avarice and criminal irresponsibility on the part of financial institutions, as well as all the hideous mess of the environment, the energy crisis, health insurance, decayed infrastructure and, lest we forget, a two-front war.

They want it fixed right now, and because it can’t be fixed right now, they’re cranky and bored and have let their flea-like focus hop elsewhere, looking for the instant gratification they’ve come to expect from their electronic gadgets, credit cards and 6,000 available stores.

A lot of people in this country have gotten used to easy fixes. They have no patience for anything that requires them to think or labor or deny themselves. They’re used to having someone stick the bottle in their mouths or hand them a new toy the moment they start wailing. They have no self-discipline and, frankly, no sense.

They’re the ones who are going to endanger the effort to bring about the serious, creative changes this nation desperately needs. Creative change takes time. You can’t give it five minutes and then throw up your hands when nothing’s happened yet. It’s not magic – it’s hard work, some of the very hardest, and it has to be done properly and fully or it won’t hold up, the same way a building that’s rushed into being with a poor design and cheap materials will end up collapsing. 

Obama and his administration are trying to do that work. They won’t do it perfectly – no one could. But they will be able to do it much more effectively if the nation’s legions of oversized toddlers grow up for once, stop demanding immediate results and help the rest of us think through the problems we face.

Besides, even in worlds where wizards are possible, we’ve seen that magic can’t reverse what indulgence, greed and impatience have spoiled.

How to bring about creative change

Perhaps the greatest problem in making imaginative and effective change of any kind is getting any two people to agree on a goal and a strategy for achieving it – and then seeing the plan through to success.  

Americans, with their deep-dyed romantic traditions of rugged individualism, always seem to be starting their own little solo things instead of working together on projects that could have more impact because of their larger size and numbers of participants. I’d be entertained to see, for instance, a comprehensive list of all the foundations my countrymen and -women have started over the last 50 years to help stamp out diseases, problems or moral wrongs that hurt their loved ones. I’d also like – maybe less – to see a list of all the redundant little businesses Americans have set up and seen fail. 

Being American myself, I think individualism matters for many reasons, one of which is that encourages every person to have confidence in the power of his or her own initiative. You don’t get anywhere if everyone waits around to be led.

But the truth is, you also don’t get far enough if everyone is charging off in 300 million different directions. We tend to do that here.

Maybe we should try something else – like identifying our most important creative goals, pooling resources and working together to get results instead of each one of us closeting himself with his ambition and reinventing the wheel by the light of his own ego? 

Europeans seem to be doing just that kind of collaborating. At a major conference of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009 (a project of the European Commission) this month, thinkers and doers from all over the continent got together, determined what the three main focuses of their creative efforts should be – employment, well-being and education – and made a list of things to do. A lot of it involves reaching across barriers, sharing resources and being regional in attitude.

If they can make this plan work – with over a  thousand more years of tribal, national, ethnic and class strife to overcome than does the U.S. – we Americans won’t have any excuses left for our own fractious, short-sighted and self-involved approach to the future.