"Bloggers vs. Blight"

Here's an interesting blog from The Detroit News: "Going Home: A Journal On Detroit's Neighborhoods." And here's an article about the blog and the online community it has mobilized to fight back urban decay in Detroit: "Bloggers vs. Blight" (in the online Utne magazine).

Culture in the City

In 1938, Lewis Mumford wrote: "The city... is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community." I previously wrote about how the seat of government is found in the city. But how many of us think of it as the seat of culture?

Even if a metropolitan library has many branches, its main library will be downtown. The major newspapers usually operate out of the city. Concerts, ballets, plays, operas and musicals, they are all performed at theaters and halls in the city, or as close to it as possible. That is not to say that there are no cultural events in the suburbs, but they still tend to be concentrated in the city. Anyone living in or near the downtown area has a front row seat, so to speak, on any cultural events that come to or originate in town.

Now, being able to afford tickets to such events is another matter altogether. For the poor and working poor, even often for the middle class, these cultural activities are out of reach. So what good does it do to live near them? It's scary to think that generations of children are not ever exposed to cultural events such as those outlined above. Every performance should have a certain number of deeply discounted tickets for people who can't afford the full price. Schools should be able to buy up batches of affordable tickets so that they can take their students to the events.

Another negative aspect of cultural events taking place in the sity is that a lot of people won't go there because they perceive it as unsafe. The irony is that the more activities that take place in a city, the safer it is. I can't say what the experience is like in my city, because I haven't been able to afford to go to any cultural events there. But I don't think Columbus has a reputation for having a vibrant downtown. It was on its way a few years ago when a major indoor mall was built there with inexpensive parking. Suddenly, downtown was the place to go. But then one of our major developers opened a huge mall in a suburban area, and it became the all the rage to go there and to other outlying malls that imitated it. The downtown mall is all but closed now, and fewer people go downtown as a result.

No one activity can guarantee a city's success. It needs to be a muli-use area for it to truly come alive. Cultural events, workplaces, government offices, worship services, sports, educational experiences, shopping and living spaces, all need to be there for a city to be alive and healthy. A city with narrow prospects and perspectives is a city that is doomed to die.

Different Kinds of City Environments

Kyle Ezell (see previous post) delineates four kinds of city environments: Post-industrial urbs, Garden urbs, Eclectic urbs, and Blank Canvas urbs. Here's how he describes them:

You will most likely to be drawn to a post-industrial urb if you "want to live as close to downtown as possible" and don't mind the city hardscape I(few or no trees). You "prefer balconies and rooftops to patios and backyards." You favor loft-type living areas and modern design. You "like the idea of living in an avant garde, edgy environment."

A garden urb is ideal for you if you want an environment similar to a small town or even suburb, albeit with much smaller lots and a premium on parking. You want some kind of garden, no matter how small, but it has to be on your patch of land. You want a single family dwelling or town-house and lots of trees. You prefer a neighborhood that is almost exclusively residential (no mixed uses like commercial, industrial, manufacturing, etc.)

Eclectic urbs are for those who are easily bored. There is always something going on in an eclectic urb, usually right on the street. There are shops and restaurants and galleries and theaters. Eclectic urbs celebrate diversity of all kinds: people and architecture, activities and functions. You are usually the non-conformist type who embraces change if you are drawn to an eclectic urb.

The blank canvas urb offers the most extreme city living environment. This is for the urban pioneer, the person who wants to be first to rehab and revitalize, the one who has a vision that few others have. These are the areas that look the most hopeless: manufacturing and industrial uses mix with abandoned buildings and vacant lots. A blank canvas dweller is one who likes a challenge and is patient and persistent.

These are just short sketches of each kind of urban environment. Ezell goes into much more detail in his book as well as including real-life examples of each type. Columbus is a good case in point. There are lofts and high-rises right downtown, areas with the small-town feel circling the urban hub, mixed-use neighborhoods (commercial and residential) lining the main streets that criss-cross in the downtown area, and devastated areas which are targeted for clean-up and restoration. I myself live in a garden urb (albeit a lower-income area), but I am only a few blocks away from an eclectic urb and a bus ride downtown to the post-industrial urb. There are also many blank canvas areas interspersed throughout the city neighborhoods.

I would prefer to be a little closer to the eclectic urb. There are several garden urbs that are closer then mine is. But they tend to be a lot more expensive, real estate-wise, so I have to be content where I am for now. What I am hoping will happen is that the eclectic urb will fill in the area between the Short North and the University district along the main street that bisects Columbus from north to south. I'm only three blocks away from that area. It already houses the local branch of the city library and a major grocery store, a few pubs, a coin-operated laundry and a "dollar store." I'd like to see a few more shops, maybe a gallery or two and at least one restaurant. We're getting there, but in the meantime, I can still walk or take the bus to anywhere I want to go in the city. It's the best of both worlds.

Get Urban!

Get Urban! The Complete Guide to Urban Living by Kyle Ezell is worth looking into if you are considering a move to the city. The author is a certified city planner working in Columbus, Ohio, which is where I live. He is also the founder of Get Urban America, an organization dedicated to the revitalization of America's cities. His premise is that you have to change American culture if you're going to get people to live in cities. I agree. All too often, people's objections to city living is rely on outmoded ways of looking at the world. We have been raised to believe that the all-American dream is to own a sizable home in the suburbs that circle the big bad cities. There are some major American cities that are attractive as places to visit, but "most" people wouldn't want to live in them. They are seen as little more than tourist destinations even though millions of people do in fact live in them. (Suburb dwellers think of these people as nuts.)

What most people are refusing to see is that space is at a premium, even in America. Granted, there are some areas where you can go miles without seeing another human being, but even in these areas, people tend to congregate in towns, if not cities. (Think Boulder, Colorado.) Cities make it easier to manage human life. Those who live out in the country have to be self-sufficient in many ways (and do a hell of a lot of driving). Of course there is the fact that cities have to be efficient in order to handle the numbers of people living in them. But it's still true that cities offer amenities that can only be dreamed of if you live in the wide open spaces.

I'm not knocking anyone's decision to live in the country. (See my post, "Five Environments.") Nor is Kyle Ezell. What we both want, though, is for people to stop demonizing cities. They can actually be at the core of our identities. I lived on the outskirts of Columbus for most of my life. I told people I was from Columbus, but I didn't really feel that I was until I moved into the city. Suddenly the cityscape became something that belonged to me. It felt like the city was there to meet my needs. I go downtown and think, "This is where I live. Not ten or more miles away in some generic subdivision, but just a mile or two up the street." It's exciting and satisfying. I'm home.

The Unfamiliar

When I take my dog for a walk here in the city, she goes wild. There's so much for her to sniff, she doesn't know where to start. I can relate. Living in the city keeps you alive, sometimes on the edge of your seat, with excitement about all the new things you're experiencing.

It doesn't matter how many times I walk down the streets, I always see something new. And whenever I see something new, it makes me use my brain. This is supposed to be good for you, especially for those who are getting older, like I am. My thoughts are always whirling as I try to fit the things I see into the worldview I already have.

When you live in the city, you are confronted with a myriad of things that you wouldn't be anywhere else. So many other places to live might are homogeneous in their population, their architecture, even their landscapes. The city is a veritable palette of people, structures and environments. I have had raccoons in the eaves of my roof, under the soffits, woodchucks and oppossums in my backyard and even seen deer crossing the railroad bridge. (Fortunately, I haven't seen too many rats.) And that's not even counting the birds. I'm not crazy about pigeons, especially when they, too, were nesting in our eaves, but bird song is everywhere, especially on a quiet morning in our big tree.

There are neighborhood parks, houses with carefully landscaped slopes and tiny courtyards, all manner of trees lining the city streets, and huge planters on the sidewalks filled with colorful foliage and flowers. Some of these things stay the same (except for growing), but there is always some kind of renovation going on as you walk through the neighborhoods. Not just of yards, but also of buildings: this one is being painted, this one gutted and rehabbed, this one torn down and another built in its place.

And the unfamiliar doesn't end there. It's fascinating to stroll through the business districts and discover what new shops have opened up or what new wares the old ones are displaying. There's always something new to look at, to sample, to experience.

And then there are the truly unfamiliar: the people. Most of those around you in the city are strangers. You may know some of the neighbors on your street (I know four), and you may recognize some regulars (people you pass on the street, or who pass by your house everyday, shoppers in the local stores), but the vast majority of people you encounter are likely to be people you don't and never will know. This always puts you in an interesting situation. Will they say hello? Should you? What do you think you can tell by the way that they dress or walk or talk? (You're most probably wrong.) I have said hi to the toughest-looking young men I pass briefly on the street and received a gentle hello in return. I've had sweet-looking high-school girls yell at me for having my dog outside. I've seen men pushing baby strollers and escorting their children to school. I've met people who are starting businesses who proudly show your their business cards. I've been approached by people I thought were beggars who just wanted a light. I've exchanged small talk with people at the bus stop.

Don't get me wrong: I've also had downright unpleasant experiences, or things that are so weird I can't wrap my mind around them. Or at least I couldn't at first. Like the man with long dreadlocks who would stride down the nearby streets every day as if in a hurry, all decked out as a woman. Or the terribly skinny and raw-faced white woman who panhandles on the street (she's always looking for bus fare) with two biracial toddlers and a baby in tow. Or the con-women that come to the door claining that they're collecting money for a woman's charity one time, and for something else the next. (And if you give them money once, they keep coming back, regular as clockwork until you finally stop.) Or the mugging that took place two blocks away in broad daylight, where the perpetrators ran away and were caught by the police, but the person who had been mugged was afraid to press charges because he lives in this neighborhood and he was afraid of retaliation.

But the more I'm around the unfamiliar, the more it becomes familiar, until I find myself missing the man/woman when he stopped appearing in the neighborhood, or the old man who always tipped his hat and proudly told me about his computer business, or the little kids who used to come around and offer to help me with things in exchange for money. Not everything is understandable or comfortable, but it's the unknown that keeps us searching for answers to life's most interesting questions.

City Schools

Yesterday, Salon.com published an interview with Sandra Tsing Loh, author of Mother On Fire, about the public school system. Loh, who works in public broadcasting, came to the realization after having her children that she couldn't afford to send them to private schools. So she looked into the public schools and was surprised by what she found there. She likens them to Costco, where nothing is fancy, but you can find some amazing things there.

This is a topic that I have rather irresponsibly ignored in my discussions of the pros and cons of urbia. Public schools can be either. But most people are afraid of city schools. They have terrible reputations, which is one reason why so many parents are avoiding them, either by moving out of the city or by never going there in the first place. I've often thought that as much as I love city living, I don't think I would have chosen to live here when my children were small. And in fact, I didn't. We moved into a school district outside of the city limits where my children were able to walk to school and live in the same neighborhood as all of their friends.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The problem was, it wasn't a top school district. My children did okay (one of my daughters was a National Merit Scholar), but they didn't have the prestige of a private school or better school district to put on their college applications. Would a city school system have made a difference? I honestly don't know because I don't know enough about ours (which is in Columbus, Ohio).

Years ago, I read Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, a book about our American school system. While the book got me on fire about the inequitable way that we fund schools, it also made me deathly afraid of city schools. The conditions he described were appalling. This has been an age-old problem and not just since busing was instituted in the 70's. But it has a lot to do with how we fund school districts, an issue Loh only indirectly refers to in the interview. Where property values are high, school districts are better funded. Usually. But city school districts pool all the property assets from the entire city. This includes areas where young professionals live and where houses start in the $200,000 range. Counterbalanced by the poorer areas, like where I live, the money gets spread thin. And yet this still adds up to a lot of money.

I confess that I don't know that much about our city school district. I do know that there was enough money to build a state-of-the-art elementary school across the street from me and that that was just one of six or seven that was built or is being built recently. I've been in a couple of the high schools. They were older and had some graffiti but I had no reason to think that they weren't good schools.

Loh makes a good point at the end of her interview. She said that it is time for us to start thinking communally instead of competitively. Our schools shouldn't be about which one is the newest or has the most amenities. Education is more about good teachers and good programs. And involved parents. Any school can be a good school if enough people put the time into finding out what is going on and are willing to do what they can do to make it better. We don't have to settle for bad schools, but it will take effort on our part to improve them.

Diversity

When I walked to the bookstore today, with my grandson in tow, I was struck, as I always am, by the many different kinds of people who live in my neighborhood. I don't know all the demographics but I do know that there are large numbers of African-Americans and Hispanics--most of the children you see around here are from one of those two groups. But these are on the residential streets and in front of the apartment buildings; the closer we get to the main street that runs through downtown, the more whites we see. By the time we get to the shopping district known as the South Campus Gateway, the crowds are predominantly white. Of course, as the name implies, we are close to the Ohio State University.

But in my own neighborhood, not only is the diversity racial and ethnic, it is also socioeconomic. Only 14% of its inhabitants are homeowners and this area has the highest ratio of Section 8 housing in the city. A rehabbed house is often next door to one that is vacant. There are a fair amount of cars, but a high percentage of people walk or use public transportation. This is perhaps the most significant kind of diversity. It means that the area is highly transient and that there are a lot of people on the streets. It also means that those who own homes are often discouraged by the lack of care shown by renters toward their own dwellings.

But what is the most significant to me is that there is so much sameness in all this diversity. Mothers and fathers still walk their kids to school. Whole families walk to church on Sunday (and sometimes during the week as well). Children and teens flock to the local library to take advantage of its many programs, including help with their homework. Fathers as well as mothers are seen with their children in tow as they go about their business. Flowers are planted in front of apartment buildings (by the tenants, not property management). Parents bring their children to the local day care center. The sounds of schoolbuses and hordes of children resonate on the grounds of the elementary school. People walk by and compliment me on my garden.

Perhaps the greatest lesson for me from living in this neighborhood is how alike people really are. We may live in different types of dwellings, earn different levels of income, have varying degrees of education, work at a wide range of jobs, and come from different backgrounds, but we all want our children to be safe, to live in nurturing environments, to have a place we can call home. We share this neighborhood and together make up its special atmosphere. But the basics can be found anywhere.