Wind Wars

Maple Ridge Wind Farm, upstate New York – the largest wind farm east of the Mississippi. Photo by Jon R. Vermilye, Lakshoreimages.

New York State ranks 8th in the U.S. for installed and operational power generation from the wind. 1,274 megawatts. This is enough to power over 500,000 households. Or a region the size of, say, Rochester. Good, but a long, long way from really good.

For a bit of perspective, there are 19.5 million people in New York State – about 8 million households. This means that about 6% of the state’s households are powered by the state’s wind farms. Obviously we have to build renewable energy sources at a very different scale and rate in order to become truly sustainable and secure as quickly as it is clearly necessary.

So it came as a bit of an unhappy surprise to read an article this week in the local paper. It turns out that residents of counties and towns in the region around Rochester, where a range of wind turbine projects are being proposed, are filing law suits like crazy to stop construction.

A lawyer for the opposition claims that he believes “opposition to wind developments is growing.” The most often cited complaint about wind turbines in all the lawsuits: noise.

Noise? Huh?

No acid rain, no burning coal, no noisy cooling towers, no railroad cars dumping mounds of coal, no tractors heaving the coal, no dumping residue into piles of slag. And no mountaintops being ripped off or blown up to mine the coal.

Just whoosh.

Come on, people. We have work to do here.

Progress

In an electronic conversation this afternoon, my sister got me thinking. I think I have found one interesting way to get to know a place in the city. Take a look.

The intersection of Main and Clinton Streets in downtown Rochester, in 1896. Now let’s see what happens over the next century or so.

Main and Clinton, 1911.

Main and Clinton, 1919.

Main and Clinton, 1925.

Main and Clinton, 1939.

Main and Clinton, 1941.

Clinton and Main, 1954.

Main and Clinton, 1990.

Photo by fusionstigma, from flickr.

Main and Clinton, 2009.

As novelist Ellen Glasgow once reminded us, “All change is not growth; as all movement is not forward.”

Sowing the Seeds of Sprawl

In response to my recent post about 20th century urbanism here in Rochester, fellow Rochester urbanist Tim Raymond suggested that I find a report from the 20s authored by planner Harland Bartholomew. With the help of the Rochester Regional Community Design Center (RRCDC), I found it, and have it in hand. Entitled “A Major Street Plan for Rochester, New York,” and created by Bartholomew & Associates, (they call themselves City Plan and Landscape Engineers), it was published in 1929.

The “Street Plan” is the bad seed of 20th century urbanism here. From this document we can easily get a glimpse of the first nasty tendrils of what was to become the poisonous Inner Loop. Not originally planned to be a moat, certainly – that madness comes later. But in this document, the automobile gains right-of-way over reasonable civic and urban principles, and the future course of regional sprawl is assured.

Here’s what was troubling the Rochester City Planning Board when they retained Bartholomew for the study:

Love the graphics, but…. In the 6 years between 1922 and 1928, vehicle registrations in the city had doubled, to about 91,000 cars.

And of course with more cars comes more traffic, and more congestion. In 1929, professionals were beginning to understand how to analyze and engineer for the ‘motor age.’ Traffic counts, average daily trips per roadway, turning radius requirements, lane widths – all of this was becoming an identifiable discipline.

So with 91,000 cars, and an engineer’s perspective (if it’s scientific, it must be inarguable), here’s what you get:

10,500 cars in the peak hour, probably evening rush since the chart says “leaving business district.” Congestion, traffic, horrors!

Of course if we had 10,500 cars leaving downtown at rush hour today, we would think the place had been abandoned. But in the 20s, the roads that the motor age was heir to were not designed for speed, convenience or volume. Most of the city streets were designed for horses and carts, and some redesigned for streetcars. But not motor cars.

Roads for the motor age had to carry lots of cars, and more importantly they had to go places at speed – distant places. And so Bartholomew recommended redoing old streets, and creating new streets, sufficient to meet these new criteria. Like this:

And for the minor streets:

And once the basic rules were established for street widths – we call them cartways today – the routing and connecting and constructing could begin. And so here we go, down the path that resulted 20 years later in the Inner Loop as we now know it.

First, a look at the downtown roadway and circulation system before the study:

And then a look at the report’s recommendations for downtown:

Now the strategy becomes clear. Create a loop of streets around downtown, and through streets within downtown, that are straight, continuous, wide enough for higher volume, and speedy. We’re gettin’ out of town….

And of course we need to see the downtown loop in the context of the roadways of the region. This next image is scary, startling. The city is doomed.

So there it is – the Inner Loop at the core, and the beginnings of the outer loops of the other expressways. The stage is set for the predicted city population of 1,000,000  “within the next 50 years” – they got that right – to spread out all over the place with the new network of roads for cars.

To make the point of all this with a bit more force, take a look at this:

Remarkable. Ideas have consequences.

Bartholomew was aware, in some tiny way, of the dangers that lay ahead. In the report he says, “The automobile has invited an excessive spread of population and it is important that the consequent development beyond the present municipal boundaries be carefully controlled to prevent chaotic and uneconomic tendencies.” Which, of course,  it wasn’t.

Perhaps more interestingly, and pathetically, Bartholomew shows us, in a brief two sentences early in the report, what really lies behind all this roadway business: “It is of utmost importance that the population of the city be uniformly distributed. An over-concentration of population is usually accompanied by poor housing conditions and other social problems.”

As I said, doomed. By 1929, this city’s fate was sealed. Now what? Onward.

The Arc of Urban Change: Rochester in the 20th Century

It’s impossible to begin to imagine a next Rochester, or any next city, without understanding its history. In particular, it is imperative to understand how this city got as screwed up as it is during the course of the 20th century. And I do mean screwed up.

Oh, Rochester wasn’t alone – the arc of change for this city has been much like the arc of change for most American cities. But the unique efflorescence of modern urbanism here has resulted from the particular identity and character of this place – climate, geography, history, culture, industry, attitudes, events, governance. Let me explain.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Rochester was home to 162,800 people, and was the 24th largest city in the U.S. By mid-century, the city had reached its peak population of 332,488. At the end of the century, the city population had receded to 219,773. By 2000, the region, which was entirely populated by city dwellers in 1900, had grown to a sprawl of city and suburbs totaling 1,034,090, the 51st largest in the nation.

Rochester, looking northwest. Wiki image.

Again, the features of Rochester’s shift from a centralized city to an auto-dominated, sprawling (and unsustainable) region are the same as most American cities born in the late 18th or early 19th century. The markers along this arc of change are well known to all of us.

Cars, suburbs, shifting places of employment, strip shopping and big malls,  more cars, waning transit, complaints about congestion, expressways, more cars, empty downtowns with literally half the land used as parking lots, increasing strains on city coffers as the wealth, and population, of the region motors into the countryside.

Sound familiar? Everycity, U.S.A.

Carol Stream, Illinois. Photo by Alex MacLean.

But now let’s take a peek at this particular city, and its particular circumstances.

During the 20th century, Rochester was a place of wealth far greater than its size would suggest. Kodak, Western Union, Bausch and Lomb, and in 1906, Xerox, were enormously successful in the early years of the century, and this wealth allowed for the construction of substantial social infrastructure.

Shopping downtown, Christmas, 1915.

Today, we Rochesterians enjoy culture well beyond our census data – a great orchestra, and the Eastman School of Music, (30 cultural institutions started by George Eastman largesse alone), great museums of a wide array, great universities, a great jazz festival, and a summer ‘art’ fair that draws more people than the city’s population. There is much to see and do, and experience, for a city this size.

Throngs at the Corn Hill Arts Festival.

And the city’s population, and now the region’s, is and has been characterized by a very high level of technical skill and scientific and technical education. Beginning in the 19th century, Rochester was home to companies and institutions that needed, and attracted,  a gifted workforce.  In fact, that’s one reason why we’re here.

Amy’s parents came here in the early 1930s, and her father joined Kodak. He was a physical chemist, worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII, and then returned to Kodak. When her parents moved to upstate New York from Pittsburgh, they lived at first in the city. But by the mid 1930s they had moved to the northern suburb of Irondequoit. So it goes.

Downtown Rochester, 1938.

This moment then, the mid 30s, was the top of Rochester’s arc of change – the city population took a dip in the 30s as folks spread out, presaging what was to come. Then, with WWII, the population stabilized and grew a bit due to the war effort, before the inevitable exodus began again, now in earnest, by the 1950s.

So in the late 30s, there was already a lot of hubbub about traffic and congestion. Even though Rochester had a subway beginning in the late 20s, and streetcars until 1941, (pretty early for a streetcar system collapse – they ran in my hometown near Chicago until the mid-1950s), automobiles were king at a pretty early moment.

The Sea Breeze Trolley – gone but not forgotten.

Thus comes the most single most destructive moment in the city’s 20th century urban history – one that set a precedent for all kinds of other really dreadful urban missteps. Not the only big mistake mind you, but the worst. The Inner Loop.

Conceived as a way to alleviate increasing downtown congestion as the city’s population neared its peak, the Inner Loop was born as an idea in the late 30s and early 40s. Engineering began in earnest in the late 40s, and the Loop was under construction by the early 50s. Huge swaths of urban clearing were undertaken to make way for the moatlike expressway – a kind of prelude to the massive urban renewal of the later 50s so common throughout the U.S.

The 1951 Inner Loop plan.

Hundreds of buildings were demolished, and a kind of Maginot Line was created between the fabric of the city and its downtown. And this was only the first of these efforts. Later expressways followed, making it easier and easier to avoid the central city. And of course as it got easier to live away, it got easier to shop away from downtown, and to live all of the rest of one’s life without ever seeing the city itself.

So where does all this leave us? Rochester is a shrinking city with a great history, great richness of culture and social infrastructure, great assets in its population and their impressive capabilities, a lovely city with wonderful tree-lined streets and historic architecture. The surrounding countryside is enormously attractive, the Lake is at hand, the universities are very strong (University of Rochester has now supplanted Kodak as the region’s largest employer). It’s a pretty terrific place. But it is not sustainable, in any sense.

Sprawl in Greece, NY,  a suburb of Rochester.

What do I mean? Well, perhaps the simplest way to understand the challenges ahead is by doing a little simple math.

The Rochester Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) comprises five counties: Livingston, Monroe (where the city resides), Ontario, Orleans and Wayne. The regional population in a 2007 estimate was set at 1,030,495. The land area of the MSA is 4,869 square miles, or 3,116,160 acres. All of which leaves us with a mess of sprawl – 1 person for every 3 acres.

Does the MSA include farmland and parks and other open space? Of course it does, like any other MSA in the nation. But spreading out like we have means many features of now 21st century life can’t continue much longer.

Spreading out on Ridge Road, Rochester.

Here’s just one reason, without resorting to any environmental mumbo-jumbo: money.

If the region has just over 1,000,000 souls, and has had to build all of the physical and social infrastructure necessary to allow this level of sprawl, there is a limit that we can reasonably expect in taxes extracted versus cash required to pay for the mess. And we are reaching that limit. Every day we read about the fact that there are not enough dollars to pay for schools, repair bridges, keep the libraries open, provide adequate fire service – it’s pretty much an endless list. (It doesn’t help that New York as a state is in major financial trouble as well, and for many of the same reasons). Property taxes here are some of the highest in the nation, while real estate values languish.

So without resorting to facts like global warming, or water scarcity, or an industrialized food system that is eating us alive, or a lack of sustainable energy, or any other of the problems that are closing in on all of us at a breakneck pace, we can talk about the sustainability and survivability of a city, and a region, from a strictly economic perspective. We can’t go on much longer as we have been – we simply cannot afford it.

Or we could talk about governance as another example of  why a region like ours will have to make some fairly radical changes in order to carry on. This part of the nation is a county-strong place – county governments have a lot of power here. The county and the city are wrangling all the time for control of all sorts of stuff – the big one at the moment is schools. But with five counties in the region, a major city, and hundreds of towns, villages, school districts, park districts – you name it – we are constantly tripping over boundaries, and local sets of interest. With all of these separate units of government, there is endless bickering over power, endless NIMBYism, endless attempts to protect one fiefdom or another.

So while our fates are inevitably lashed together, our system of governance is perfectly designed to prevent us from working together on our really big challenges.

I suppose I will have to take some consolation in all these reflections from a few favorite words from poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who said “of all the memberships we identify ourselves by, the one thing that is most forgotten…. is place…. people who can agree that they share a commitment to the landscape/cityscape – even if they are otherwise locked in struggle with each other – have at least one deep thing to share.”

Maybe this is the tiny patch of ground we need on which to start building the next city.

The Block, the Street – in Rochester

I do want to talk here about what a next Rochester might look like, and how the city might be transformed into a useable, durable, and sustainable urbanism to serve its future. I intuit that this shrunken city (population of 332,500 at its peak in 1950, about 219,000 today – a reduction of slightly more than a third) and its sprawling, auto-dominated region of about 1.2 million faces some pretty staggering challenges ahead. But before that conversation can begin, its back to urban basics.

The simplest and surest way to get to know any city is to take time to understand its streets and blocks. I am embarked on that task here, in our new home place.

Streets

Rochester in 1912.

The oldest and central part of the city, downtown, is sufficiently aged, and has been sufficiently cut up, moated by the laughable Inner Loop, ravaged by horrific 20th century modernism, and assaulted by surface parking lots, that if there is a useful pattern to the streets here, it is not discernible.

Downtown Rochester from 10,000 feet. Google Earth.

But if one sifts through the archives a bit, some patterns do emerge.

Once, most of the city’s diagonal streets converged on downtown. I noticed this clearly when I found an old street map from 1912, above, and another from 1955 – before the Inner Loop – below.

1955 map of downtown Rochester.

Downtown was a nexus of converging diagonals – Monroe, East, St. Paul, South, North, Clinton, and of course, Main, among others.

This convergence corresponds nicely with the Genesee River waterfalls: these falls were the central point of Rochester’s beginning. It was here, in 1789, that Ebenezer “Indian” Allen built the first grist mill (Rochester’s nickname was The Flour City, though now it has become the Flower City – lilacs), and a tiny enclave of outbuildings. 

The population in 1790 was only about 25 souls, and the mill didn’t stay in operation for long, but the city had been born.

Allen’s mill, on the banks of the Genesee, in 1789.

By 1800 the land had passed into the hands of Colonel Nathaniel Rochester. Rochester moved his family to the area in 1808, and began surveying his 100 acre tract, and creating parcels for sale, in 1811. His basic unit of property was a quarter acre lot – a size that sounds familiar to us even today. 

But Rochesterville was still pretty rough round the edges:

Bucolic Rochester, 1812.

A few years later, in 1823, the Erie Canal arrived, followed shortly by the railroads, and the little village blossomed into a full-fledged city – more than 20,000 people by 1840, almost 5 times the population of Chicago at that time. By 1900, Rochester was the 24th largest city in the entire country.

Rochester and the falls at night, 1925.

Busy streets of a buzzing city divide the land into blocks, our next subject of inquiry.

Blocks

Rochester is a city with few repeating patterns in its street and block forms. The roads and resulting blocks seem to go every which way. Part of this perception is a result of my upbringing, in the rigidly gridded fabric of Chicago.

When Col. Rochester undertook his parcelization in 1811, his blocks were rectangular, as was the custom of the day. By 1817, the city’s blocks were laid out as shown in the image below. North is to the right on this map.

Rochester map, 1817.

If you look closely, you can see that the alleys, as well as the streets, have names. I would love to say that alleys are a feature of most Rochester blocks, but alleys are decidedly not a feature of most Rochester blocks. In fact, there are very few alleys in this town, but when you can find one, it usually does have a name. Haags Alley, Parker Alley, Jordan Alley. Most of the oldest blocks with alleyways were in the central city, and were blown up in the quest for the Inner Loop. Harrumph.

(No alleys means that increasing the Rochester urban density, which I believe all cities must do in order to become sustainable, will be more difficult than if alleys were present. In Rochester, alley housing, or as the Canadians more delicately call it, laneway housing, will be hard to achieve. But more about that later – let’s stick to basics).

By 1820, the city looked like a burgeoning hamlet. The map from 1820, below, seems a bit optimistic – is this a marketing brochure? – since the population was only 1,502.

Rochester map, 1820.

The streets and rectangular blocks are oriented by the river, and the alleys persist.

By 1827, as the city’s population neared 9,000, the basic orientation of streets and blocks was quite well established.

The grid of blocks and streets east of the river has pivoted to a northeast and southwest orientation, with East Avenue as its main east-west drag. East Avenue is the street that joins Main and Franklin at the little triangular urban space in the right center of the map. This little triangle would eventually become home to the Liberty Pole, which today is lighted during the holiday season.

We went to the lighting ceremony this year. The city hopes every year that the ceremony, with its parade and bands and ice skating and general hoo-ha, will bring lots of folks downtown. This year there were probably 300 people in attendance. Oh well.

The Liberty Pole.

Parenthetically, (this whole post is parenthetical) the Liberty Pole at this intersection has a deep history. The first one was erected in 1846 by the East Side Boys, a political club. It lasted until a storm in 1859. It was replaced, in 1861, by the version below.

This version lasted until 1889, when it was felled in a storm. Then it was 75 years until James Johnson would create the Liberty Pole we have today. Anyway, that’s the intersection of Franklin, East and Main. Back to the blocks.

As I was musing, the 1827 plat shows that most of the basic orientation of the blocks was established at a very early moment in the city’s history. South of the third ward, a north/south orientation arises, and in the fifth ward as well. The orientations of 180 years ago would establish the basic urban kit of parts for the city for generations to come. 

Consulting Rochester maps from the later 19th and early 20th century testifies to the fact that the basic approach to city making here was pretty well established before 1830.

Outside of downtown, the city is, except for a handful of older commercial corridors, principally characterized by single-family residential neighborhoods. As a result the blocks are not very deep, with two homes back to back at between 230 feet and 300 feet or so.

While the blocks are not very deep (no alleys, alas), they can often be quite long. Once you have understood the basics of block depth, which may be called the warp, the woof of block length just seems to go on. It’s quite common to find 1,000 foot long blocks here. Not really conducive to mixed use, walkable neighborhoods, I’m afraid. We need mid-block snickets, or cut-throughs, so walkers can move about easily.

Walkers. In Rochester, most neighborhoods were not created with walking in mind. There are a couple of exceptions, but our new neighborhood scores only a 46 at www.walkscore.com. Rats! – in DC we were a 91, and in Chicago we were a 94. Get in the car, I guess.

So. A brief look at streets and blocks in Rochester. I am learning how the city came to be the way it is. Next up, I need to think about what happened here after the city reached its peak population of about 333,000, in 1950, and it began to move from 32nd largest city in the nation to today, when it is the 99th largest city in the country.

More work ahead. Rochesterians – what have I missed? Or screwed up? Onward.

Rochester in Motion

Cars are everywhere. Shopping is at one of the four major malls, out in the suburbs – there’s almost no retail left downtown. There’s an inner and an outer loop of expressways that act like walls to the now forbidden city. All that’s left of public transit is a bus system, and here in Rochester it is impossible, unbelievably, to get a single system-wide map. You know what this all feels like – everywhere U.S.A.

Not so oddly, it wasn’t always so. Rochester once had all of the buzz, and commerce and mobility, of the Erie Canal.

And a huge amount of rail service – freight, passenger, short haul and long, interurbans to Buffalo and Syracuse and beyond, and of course, the ubiquitous streetcar, complete with a line to the amuseument park in Charlotte, on the shore of Lake Ontario. A truly intermodal city. And a handsome one, at that.

Rochester even had a subway, shown below during construction.

The subway opened in 1927, and ran beneath the city until 1956. The alignment map shows a system oriented northwest to southeast. There were connections available to a number of surface rail systems – streetcar lines, interurbans, and longer range rail lines. It must have been pretty easy to move around the region in those days.

The line ran only about 2 miles in tunnels – the rest was grade-separated in a cut, most of which, before 1918, was the old Erie Canal. The Erie canal was relocated and became the Erie Barge Canal in about 1918, and the old canal bed was set for its next incarnation – rail transit.

Of course in its current incarnation, much of the canal has become home to the expressways of today - such is progress.

Rochester was reputed to be the smallest city in the world with a subway system. And interestingly, much of the old downtown subway tunnel remains mostly intact.

Image by Carol Fil/Flickr.

In fact, it has become the center of a protracted debate about the need for renewed public transit access, public safety (the tunnels are often used as shelter for the homeless), and public fiduciary responsiblity (the city pays something north of $1.2m annually to maintain the tunnel). The city has been trying for years to fill the tunnels in, and transit advocates have kept this from happening. It looks at this point as if the advocates are finally going to lose – the tunnels are slated to be filled in the spring of 2010. As a local urbanist said recently, unearthing them later is not an overwhelming task. We shall see.

And of course Rochester is blessed with more than its fair share of transit geeks (I count myself as one of these, by the way). One of the groups, the Rochester Rail Transit Committee, is outspokenly advocating a revival of regional rail transit. They have even created their own system map. 

The proposed system connects most of the region of now about 1.2 million – spread out all over the place – connects the airport to the rest of the city, gets down to the University of Rochester, the region’s single largest employer (Wegmans, the grocer, is second largest, and Kodak now a distant third), and hooks up the High Falls and the river downtown to Charlotte and the Lake Ontario beaches to the north. Oh, and reuses the old subway tunnel. Not a bad piece of work, really. The four cardinal shopping malls aren’t part of the system – they aren’t really sustainable for too much longer anyway - but the baseball stadium AND the soccer stadium are on the green line.

And so, like many other American cities, an unsustainable auto-dominated present is built upon the foundations of a past which featured a rich array of mobility assets.  

Back to the future!

Rochester, Then and Now

I continue my research, as I try to become familiar with how our new home city came to be the way it is. And so I have finished reading the Frederick  Law Olmsted Jr. and Arnold Brunner 1911 “City Plan for Rochester.”

It’s quite a document – vintage City Beautiful Movement in text, designs, and recommendations. I decided this afternoon to undertake a bit of a “then-and-now” comparison to examine what they suggested and what is actually in place today. You can find the whole book online if you’re interested.

The centerpiece of the plan is a recommendation for a new Civic Center. Much like Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, the Rochester Plan uses the proposed Civic Center as the central focus for an array of other recommendations. Here is what they proposed:

The plan view is an interesting piece of urban design, weaving building and streetways together: the Civic Center is placed astride Main Street, with roadways and trolley running through the building, which then enfronts a pair of large civic open spaces. North is at the top in this drawing from the Plan, below.

And here is what this site looks like today.

That’s W. Main Street running left to right (east and west) in the middle of the photo. The Civic Center would have run from the 490 Inner Loop expressway that you can see curving around downtown, east to Washington, which is the north/south street a block to the left of the red dot. It would have been about three blocks long east/west, and about two blocks wide, north/south.

City Hall today remains in a Richardsonian Romanesque building at Fitzhugh and Church Streets, about three blocks north and east of the proposed Civic Center.

This part of downtown is pretty sparse these days, as you can see. There’s nothing here except surface parking lots. Best part: the Red Wings baseball stadium just the other side of the moat, um, I mean the expressway.

Next I took a look at the City Plan’s proposal for a new train station. They proposed a site between Joseph and Clinton, bisected by Cumberland. Here’s what they recommended:

The station backs up to the raised railroad embankment, and enfronts a large plaza with semicircular parterres. Access is along either Clinton or Joseph, which have been turned into tree-lined parkways.

As Clinton and Joseph converge at Pleasant Street, another plaza is created, which features a large round area for a fountain or monument. This second plaza is an urban signal of the presence of the station, and a gateway to or from the station.

Here’s the site today:

There is a pretty nasty looking brick station and lots of surface parking. No plaza – just parking lots. And the second plaza, at Joseph, Clinton and Pleasant, falls smack dab in the middle of moat/Inner Loop.

Compounding this urban misfire is the fact that a great train station in fact was constructed on the site recommended by the Plan. Designed by very noted Rochester architect Claude Bragdon, the building opened in 1914. It looked like this:

Amy remembers this building vividly. The interior was quite gorgeous, with fabulous masonry and tile work throughout.

I say ‘was’ because the building was destroyed in phases starting in the late 60s, until it was completely gone by the mid 70s. Now if you want to catch the train you get to enjoy this:

The public library here says that losing the Bragdon station was “arguably one of the greatest losses to Rochester’s architectural scenery and history.” No argument there.

Rochester, like nearly every other American city, engaged in a decades-long gala festival of horrific urban decisions in the late 20th century. Time and again pretty much everything one could do to wreck a place, and employ the worst kind of city making, Rochesterians succeeded in accomplishing.

What’s interesting is that underneath all that horror are a few pretty terrific ideas, other ideas about city making that could perhaps represent some of the necessary new foundations for the next Rochester.

I will read on.

A Town Square – On the Move

Hecker and Decker are on the move – to Rochester, NY. Here’s a look at our new neighborhood.

Rochester at 20,000 feet.

Stay tuned for further developments as we settle in to a new home place.

Sneak Peek

Since we began posting here at A Town Square, in November of 2007, it has always been with an eye to using the blog as a research and development platform for a book, or something like a book. Who knows – maybe an HBO mini-series.

The book, with a working title of The Next City: Shaping a Useable Future, may or may not ever see the light of day. But the premise for the effort is simple – the cities we live in are obsolete, and simply cannot meet the challenges of what lies ahead. We can understand these challenges in economic terms, or environmental terms, or in terms of over-population, or in terms of shortages of jobs, water, energy, food, money. But our cities, the real engines of all nations, are obsolete. And we need to reinvent them at the speed of light.

So all the while I have been posting here, I have been doing so with the book’s table of contents in mind. And now I have collected something like 40 posts, put them in chapters, and self-published them as a 180 page book, which you can see at  www.blurb.com. I have also collected the four posts on vernacular urbanism and put them in a slim 32 page volume, also at www.blurb.com.

So if you’d like, you can go there, type in the book titles, and take a look. And tell me what you think. Remember, as good friend Larry correctly observed recently, these are books about books. Tools. Means, not ends. The real work lies ahead.

 Me? I’m going fishing now, for a publisher.

What Does Growth Really Mean?

I’ll make this short. I am very cranky this afternoon, and I admit it. The lead from the AP wire, a few minutes ago: “Consumers are saving more than they’re spending, and that has investors worried.” What?!?!

Okay, so what, really, is the point of our economy? A rising GDP is the whole game? After a long swooning flirtation with seemingly unending profligacy, consumers are now chastened, are saving, and that worries investors? Nuts. Just totally nuts.

Investors, guess what? The growth you have in mind is not the growth anybody wants anymore. Sorry guys – the big banks are shot, the auto industry has tanked, homebuilders are dropping like flies, the malls are ghost towns. It’s over (at least I wish it was).

Hey, world of investors and makers of things, why not try investing in and making things that will help us? Local stuff, stuff that eases the frightening messes we face. Can we not replace GDP with something that makes sense, something that measures how we are doing in creating cities that are actually capable of sustaining us, and our children’s children?

What, in the end, is growth for? Riches, but then what? It’s easy to see that we have spent decades building an economy that has wrecked our cities, our countrysides, our air, our water, our food. (By the way investors, are you keeping track of how many films have been released in the last three months dealing with our food disaster? Opportunity?).

Can we get you to pay attention, please?