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.