I oppose the proposed “mixed-use” development in Simsbury called River Oaks. I do so for various reasons. On the surface, the development looks smart and sexy, but deeper study of the system of life in the area brings to life various issues, not about building communities within communities, but how living systems extend either towards a center or out from it.

Smart Growth as an idea is pretty sound in the context of human geography and ecology. The body plays a major role in its fundamental ideas: walking, communing, and creating in scaled spaces. Smart growth is also interpretable in its concepts: how do people define, for example, open space? What open space should be preserved? How is a forest dividing line “open”? It is in this relationship that ironies typically arise that show contradictory interpretations. For example, how much distance should exist between home and work? What criteria determine ethical distances? Gas mileage?

One issue that gets in the way is the notion of suburb, an area concept that I don’t typically associate with smart growth. My image of suburbs is pretty distorted, given that suburbs are a conception of urban growth themselves via incorporation (a smaller area becoming part of a larger) or as a means of providing for expanding populations or as a collection of residential places outside of a city center but not dispossessed from that city center. “Suburbia” is an offshoot of urban growth or “sprawl,” not of urban density or systematic design. Remember ET, whose images of suburbia were “expansion” or “extension” oriented, with dominoes of houses crowding off into the landscape?

But Simsbury isn’t an extension of Hartford. Simsbury is typically identified as a suburb and I know many people in Simsbury who commute into the urban center of Hartford to work. But does this make Simsbury a suburb? I would suggest no. Simsbury typically argues a unique identity as a small New England, scenic town with a village center and residential properties that supposedly extend outward from it. The town center is a mix of commerce, communication, destination, and municipal business. This is, of course, an ideal, and has nothing to do with the reality of Simsbury as it is now laid out. Simsbury, as are most towns in the area, is a mixed bag of businesses, churches, living spaces, and condominiums that spread out from the Route 10 strip. It’s often hard to distinguish when one is in Simsbury and not somewhere else. The strip of Avon along Route 44 is what would basically characterize as a disaster of “growth.” I can’t walk from my house to the Center of Simsbury to meet with friends because Simsbury doesn’t have a center. River Oaks seeks to ameliorate this “lack of center” by building a “new” community within a 60 acre area at the Avon border that conforms to “smart growth” principles. This would simply multiply the essential asymmetry problem Simsbury already suffers.

I bring up the suburb issue only to highlight the problem of perfuming a fish. Simsbury doesn’t need a new community within a community, nor can Simsbury use an “urban” concept to redraw its center of gravity. Simsbury, Avon, and other “New England towns” need total redesign. Until people begin to think in “total redesign” terms, I want nothing to do with ventures like River Oaks. Here’s what I mean by total redesign.

In Simsbury (and in places like Canton), development needs to take on the attitude of incremental spatial redesign beginning with road design. We don’t need wider roads to handle growing traffic, we need to widen the center of the road then redesign from that consequence. (I would suggest planting trees in the center of Route 10 to complement the Sycamores along the strip from West Street to the Town Hall). The alternative would be to make Route 10 a one way Boulevard. The next step would be to consolidate and connect the minor sprawl happening on either side of the Dyno Corp facilities into a mixed use area that would offer regions that could be walked one side to the next. If this were the case, then River Oaks would fit nicely and would become an extension to the human surfaces already designed as “the town.”

Jack Kaplan writes in the Hartford Courant:

As a longtime environmental activist with the Sierra Club, my personal view is that we should support it. From a smart growth perspective, River Oaks falls far short of perfection.

Among other things, it is not served by mass transit, it is built on land that is currently open space, and the housing will probably be expensive and undesirable for families. I doubt that residents will feel any great sense of community. Plus, we all love to hate big-box stores.

If the standard is perfection, then River Oaks does not measure up.

But if the standard is – as I think it should be – whether the project reduces sprawl, then River Oaks probably deserves at least a B+. As a mixed-use development near large employment centers and along a pedestrian/bike path, it will reduce automobile traffic by allowing people to live close to their place of employment. People who work at River Oaks and nearby office buildings can, if they choose, live at River Oaks and bicycle or walk to work. They will also be within walking and bicycling distance of restaurants and stores. Some may do without cars altogether. Others will own cars but rarely use them.

I don’t think River Oaks could possible reduce traffic or reduce commuting issues. But we could manage these things better using River Oaks as a model for a larger redesign of the town.

Would this notion ever be considered?

Smile now.

It’s nice to see Bruce Katz and Jennifer Vey writing about the city. They provide three criteria for people who think in spatial terms:

First, the state should develop a strategy to better target its market-shaping resources (infrastructure, economic development) toward existing commerce centers – the established cities and towns still struggling to find their way in an economy that has for years rendered them obsolete.

A more strategic focus of existing resources would go a long way in helping to foster private investment and development in these communities, while at the same time helping to curb sprawl and preserve rural areas.

Imagine, for example, the economic, fiscal and psychological impacts of revitalizing Connecticut’s downtown cores such that they became home to 2 percent of their respective metropolitan areas’ residents. This equates to about 23,000 residents in downtown Hartford, almost 16,500 in downtown New Haven, and nearly 18,000 in downtown Bridgeport – numbers that would bring life, vitality and a virtuous cycle of growth to these important metropolitan hubs.

Second, Connecticut needs to provide a new funding stream dedicated specifically to redevelopment activities in ailing commercial cores.

To this end, the state should establish a Regional Reinvestment Fund – modeled after a similar fund proposed for counties in northeast Ohio – that would be used to make investments in land assembly and infrastructure improvements in urban areas. This low-risk fund would be capitalized by a state-backed revenue bond, to be repaid with a real estate transfer tax on new land acquired with money from the fund. It would then operate in perpetuity, with municipalities taking half of the property tax revenue generated by the resulting new development, and putting the other half back into the fund so it can continue to be used for new projects.

Finally, the state should implement the recommendations of the Task Force on Brownfields Strategies, which calls for a new package of programs dedicated to the cleanup and development of contaminated sites, most of which are in the state’s cities. Modeled in large part after similar programs in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, this effort would provide more flexible financing tools – including loans, grants and tax incentives – to put blighted properties back into productive use and help stimulate new investment in their surrounding urban neighborhoods.

Money and strategy would do a lot. But we also need to invest in the training required to change the way we think about the human reqional landscape. Partly, this has to do with instruction and practice in a certain kinds of discourse. Sure, it sounds like a small thing, but incoming students don’t know how to talk to one another (right, who really knows how?), and I want them to stay in the state to live, and I want them to work on realistic local improvements. What they want and need has a lot to do with how they get along with one another in a situation of conflict.

In speaking of budget matters, Kevin Reenie writes

That no part of this year’s $1 billion budget surplus is going back to the people who created it tells the story of state government. There’s always an unending list of “unmet needs” that legislators, lobbyists and the governor can trot out to try to shame reluctant citizens into quiet aquiescence [sic].

Certainly government could give the billion back somehow. Or we could encourage discourse on different terms.

Does this mean happy days in Bogota

“This is a learning experiment! We are realizing that we can live without cars!” Mr. Peñalosa bellows as he cruises across the southbound lanes of Avenida 19, pausing on the wide, park-like median. A flock of young women rolls up the median’s bike path, shouting, “Mayor! Mayor!” though it has been six years since Mr. Peñalosa left office (consecutive terms are constitutionally banned in Bogota) and he has only just begun his campaign to regain the mayor’s seat.

Car Free Day is just one of the ways that Mr. Peñalosa helped to transform a city once infamous for narco-terrorism, pollution and chaos into a globally lauded model of livability and urban renewal. His ideas are being adopted in cities across the developing world. They are also being championed by planners and politicians in North America, where Mr. Peñalosa has reinvigorated the debate about public space once championed by Jane Jacobs.

. . .

His [Peñalosa] policies may resemble environmentalism, but they are no such thing. Rather, they were driven by his conversion to hedonics, an economic philosophy whose proponents focus on fostering not economic growth but human happiness.

Proponents of hedonics, or happiness economics, have been gaining influence. London School of Economics professor Richard Layard, who wrote the seminal Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, was an adviser to Tony Blair’s first Labour government. Prof. Layard asserts that, contrary to the guiding principle of a century of economists, income is a poor measure of happiness. Economic growth in England and the U.S. in the past half-century hasn’t measurably increased life satisfaction.

This NYT article plays with the money issue in teaching and technology:

The Cluster originated as an idea of Fred Phillips, a professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute, a research university, and was promoted by Kelvin Ng, an investment banker in Portland. Their vision was that a cluster would expand the capabilities and horizons of small companies. The idea evidently encouraged Portland cluster members, whose ambitions to improve American education belie their small corporate size.

“We provide the innovations for the education field, the way biotechnology companies provide innovations for the pharmaceutical industry,” Mr. Kelly of Learning.com said. He started up and sold a company in health care before moving to education.

“A revolution is needed in education — students exist in a world where technology is pervasive but classroom teaching hasn’t basically changed in 50 years,” said Mona Westhaver, a founder of Inspiration Software, a Portland area firm that developed a visual learning system for kindergarten through 12th grade. Ms. Westhaver, a founder of the Northwest Cluster, said that new approaches sought by Portland entrepreneurs include lifelong learning, online network teaching and “an end to the long summer break that was introduced for an agricultural society.”

The small companies are encouraged in their hope for change by the fact that large corporations are expanding. Pearson of London, for example, has nearly $6 billion in annual revenue from ventures in education. It recently paid nearly $500 million to acquire eCollege, a United States company that supplies distance learning programs to commercial colleges.

A revolution is always needed in education, but I imagine that the real ideas will come from committed and wise people who will work within the confines of their existing salaries. The ambition is always to improve the American education system. Maybe this can be done. But first what needs improving has to be identified. I would sit down with anyone who has an interesting product. But where’s the product that will improve the learning spaces?

Hold on, that’s the brain.

I’m going to be jotting a few notes down in Tinderbox (Ha, Mark, I no longer have to wait for the Windows version) for my up-coming romp on spatial studies in Fall writing courses, so I have to nail down the Mac keyboard and gather my thoughts on how human-designed spaces (i.e., places) shape experience and reaction.

Milwaukee, Boston, and Hartford are an interesting mash all for this. More coming.

I found Milwaukee interestingly well organized, although there was a strange emptiness to the downtown region. I was informed that the downtown is not doing all that well and that lots of concerns were moving (sprawling outward) from the center to outlying regions. But the basic design works, based around the concept of walkability.

A couple of articles in the paper this morning illustrate why spatial analysis is important. They also reveal why we have to take a serious look at the criteria we target to solve problems. The first point comes from Leonard Pitts, who presents examples of conversations he had with people at YouthBuild U.S.A.

“Some parents,” Shardell Martin, a serious, sad-eyed 20-year-old, told me, “can’t even provide a stable home for their kids. They stress themselves, they’ll resort to drugs or violence or something. Something to fill that void. Some people just don’t have no hope.”

Then there’s this article about segregation

Trinity College researchers will issue a report today showing in stark numbers how little progress has been made toward creating magnet schools that draw a mix of white and non-white students, or toward getting the city’s mostly black and Hispanic student population into mostly white suburban schools.

The report shows that magnet schools, instead of drawing white suburban children into the city, have been more popular among black and Hispanic suburban families. It also found that gains under a program allowing city children to enroll in suburban schools have ground to a halt.

Here’s more:

State officials last week announced a tentative agreement with the Sheff plaintiffs to take aggressive new measures to speed the pace of integration. A proposed extension of the 2003 agreement calls on the state to spend millions of dollars more over the next five years to subsidize magnet schools, charter schools and other programs designed to bolster integration.

That tentative agreement, which also sets new racial quotas, requires approval by the legislature and the courts.

A crucial piece of the earlier agreement revolved around magnet schools, where officials hoped that specialty themes, such as arts or technology, would attract white suburban children into the city, joining black and Hispanic children from Hartford.

In Pitts’ article, Shardell Martin is making an observation about the environment. I don’t think that “this or that” kind of additional school or monetary support for them can make much of a difference without investment in the people who live in the community, such as Hartford’s. If the space was made more positive, people would integrate into the community organically, because they’d want to, and the people already there would have something they’d want to grow and keep. “Speeding the pace of integration” is not the right goal. Promoting positive environments is the way to go, the idea to push, the future to shape.

Why have the endeavors failed? People are forgetting human spaces and their promotion.

Important to military and Intelligence thinking today is the notion of “Ethnographic Intelligence. Thanks to Anne of Space and Culture for the link. Here’s Fred Renzi on the issue (notes in original)

The proliferation of empowered networks makes “ethnographic intelligence” (EI) more important to the United States than ever before.2 Among networks, al-Qaeda is of course the most infamous, but there are several other examples from the recent past and present, such as blood-diamond and drug cartels, that lead to the conclusion that such networks will be a challenge in the foreseeable future. Given the access these networks have to expanded modern communications and transportation and, potentially, to weapons of mass destruction, they are likely to be more formidable than any adversaries we have ever faced.

Regrettably, the traditional structure of the U.S. military intelligence community and the kind of intelligence it produces aren’t helping us counter this threat. As recent debate, especially in the services, attests, there is an increased demand for cultural intelligence. Retired army Major General Robert Scales has highlighted the need for what he calls cultural awareness in Iraq: “I asked a returning commander from the 3rd Infantry Division how well situational awareness (read aerial and ground intelligence technology) worked during the march to Baghdad. ‘I knew where every enemy tank was dug in on the outskirts of Tallil,’ he replied. ‘Only problem was, my soldiers had to fight fanatics charging on foot or in pickups and firing AK-47s and [rocket propelled grenades]. I had perfect situational awareness. What i lacked was cultural awareness. Great technical intelligence…wrong enemy.'”3

I propose that we go beyond even General Scales’s plea for cultural awareness and look instead at amassing EI, the type of intelligence that is key to setting policy for terra incognita. The terra in this case is the human terrain, about which too often too little is known by those who wield the instruments of national power. The United States needs EI to combat networks and conduct global counterinsurgency. This paper will therefore define EI, discuss some cases that illustrate the requirement for it, and propose a means to acquire and process it.

The militarization of cultural and social “intelligence” is an old notion (Tacitus, Marco Polo), and in the hands of military and policy planners, at least the current crop, the results will probably be misused and malnourished. The fact of the matter is we need better thinking about human scale phenomena more than ever, from the local to the national. Just listen to the presidential hopefuls stumble all over themselves to formulate their own ideas on Health and Economic issues. Part of the problem is an inability for people to understand large-scale systems in the human context, such as cities and regions.

I go back to borders. Borders in the US should be cultural centers and destinations, not places to fear and wall up. Borders should also be shared. The US’s southern border is also Mexico’s border. I’m perfectly mindful of the charge that this is a naive position. People want to enter and blow us up, 9.11 being a case in point. But this is a misinterpretation. Many of our problems, such as drug crime, are worsened by issues unrelated to the rules, regulations, and ethics of border crossing. People come to the United States to work because they haven’t the opportunity in Chihuahua, not because they want to thumb their nose at the law. But Mexico feels its brain-drain and population loss, too, and has just as much stake in shaping its course as does the United States. We are all trained to see the world as divided by national borders. We could think differently. Physical borders become cognitive when we orient to the container of predefined place and decide on either impulse, impression, or assumption.

“‘I had to fight fanatics'” said the 3rd infantry commander. How did the commander know they were fanatics? And why were they shooting at him in the first place?

I remember a kid who once loved to kill insects. We found him blowing up horn toads with fire crackers.

“What are you doing?” we asked.

“Killing insects. I hate insects.”

“Those are lizards,” we said.

“Lizards? Are lizards insects?” he asked.

I remember that we all a little stunned.

“Shit,” he said.

You could argue that health is a way of passing through space. I can go with an injury or I can go with repair or crutches. It could also be argued that health has intrinsic value. Well, that last one may beyond argument.

Some commentators get caught up in what they call the culture of entitlement or the “entitlement mentality.” George Will writes

Mac Donald says that although some data suggest that many Hispanic immigrants live in increasing cultural and linguistic self-segregation, clearly some have assimilated in the sense of acquiring one of the nation’s unpleasant current attributes, the entitlement mentality: We are here, therefore we are entitled to be here.

In this context, entitlements are rights that people learn to value, such as social security, jobs, and education. It’s a subset argument of the “marketplace mentality” so often argued by Will and others.

When the incumbent taxi industry inveigled the city government into creating the cartel, this was a textbook example of rent-seeking — getting government to confer advantages on an economic faction in order to disadvantage actual or potential competitors. If the cartel’s argument about a “deregulatory taking” were to prevail, modern government — the regulatory state — would be controlled by a leftward-clicking ratchet: Governments could never deregulate, never undo the damage that they enable rent-seekers to do.

By challenging his adopted country to honor its principles of economic liberty and limited government, Paucar, assisted by the local chapter of the libertarian Institute for Justice, is giving a timely demonstration of this fact: Some immigrants, with their acute understanding of why America beckons, refresh our national vigor. It would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar comes to America, a native-born American rent-seeker who has been corrupted by today’s entitlement mentality would leave.

The logic is pretty clear: if the government provides education, people will become dependent on government, which will lead to “big government.” If the government provides universal health care (in other words, regulates), the insurance and health-provision establishment will no longer be able to compete, innovate, and supply jobs because government has become ultimate arbiter.

“Ever been to DMV?” Yes I have, and I’ve seen the technology they have to work with. Government’s tools are an old joke. But this can be fixed. Saws continue: Legislative bodies should not solve health care and energy issues because they might upset the market. It invites socialism and dependency. This cynical vestige of “cold-war mentality” itself limits innovative solutions.

Will’s logic is dimwitted and over-complicates decision-making. Health care does not have to be deemed a right for it to be provided universally.

I would hope that human-centered decisions become about reevaluating value. If we valued health for people over markets, we wouldn’t need to rely on fallback predetermined logics to “hope things just work out in the end.” The sun doesn’t have market share, so we shouldn’t convert all government infrastructure to solar power, hence save enough money “in the end” to provide all people with a proportionally scaled system of health, which can be judged as “infrastructure.” The proportions of health care should be judged as an innovation worthy of tackling.

Rather than persisting in our over-estimation of wealth or access as a measure of the human scale, we should change our thinking: first value health.